Report: Progress still needed for women leadership growth
Inforum has released its Michigan Women’s Leadership Report which shows signs of growth and stagnation for women in different corporate roles. The report shows a 79 percent increase in the number of women on corporate boards for Michigan’s 15 fortune 500 companies since 2007. According to this year’s report, one in four board seats at the large publicly traded companies in Michigan are held by women. The report, generated by Mike Ilitch School of Business faculty members Toni Somers and Sheri Perelli, shows women holding 15 percent of board seats in Michigan’s second tier of public companies, and eight percent of board seats in the third tier companies. “While we are encouraged by the increase of women on the boards of several Fortune 500 companies over the last decade, that hasn’t moved the needle much for women overall,” says Robert Forsythe, dean of the Mike Ilitch School of Business. “They remain vastly underrepresented at the highest levels of leadership in the overwhelming majority of Michigan companies, nearly 90 percent of which have no or only a symbolic representation of one or two women on their boards or in their C-suites.”
