Is the boardroom the last glass ceiling?

10/21/13
 
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from Fortune Magazine,
10/10/13:

While the tally of female Fortune 500 CEOs grows steadily and the bar to get on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list rises higher every year, there is one critical place where women aren’t advancing much at all: the boardroom.

In 2012, 16.6% of Fortune 500 company directors were women, according to Catalyst. That’s up from 13.6% in 2003. But the upward slope has flatlined for the past seven years.

The most common excuse — that there aren’t enough qualified female candidates — doesn’t rate. As former Ernst & Young CEO Jim Turley, who recently joined the boards of Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Emerson Electric (EMR, Fortune 500), says, “Over half of college graduates today are women — and well over half of the best graduates are women. If we’re going after the best talent, we need to put more women on boards.”

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