Executive summary

Our fifth annual study, which characterizes the boards of the most heavily funded private companies in the U.S., reveals significant improvement in board diversity over the past five years.

It also points to independent board seats as the critical lever for change when it comes to increasing cognitive diversity in the boardroom, expanding networks, and, as suggested by our latest data, even boosting funding.

Within this study, we look at gender diversity, which is reasonably measurable, as a proxy for diversity of perspectives, life experience, areas of expertise, and other demographics. In a world in which boards composed exclusively of men have been the rule rather than the exception, the presence of women in the boardroom — particularly in an independent director role — may be an indication of those boards’ intention to add diversity and of their efforts to seek talent outside their immediate networks.

Our 2023 study indicates that women now hold 17% of board seats — up from 7% in our inaugural 2019 study. Over the same period, the number of boards without any women fell significantly, from 60% to 32%. Women of color now hold 5% of board seats, up from 3% in 2020, the first year for which this metric was available.

Women who serve on boards are most likely to be independent directors, as opposed to investor or executive directors. Women hold 29% of independent board seats, compared with 13% of investor seats and 10% of executive seats. While nearly every private company board includes executive and investor directors, nearly 20% of the companies in the study haven’t appointed even one independent director.

Notably, when companies have only one independent director and that director is a woman, they raise an average of 16% more capital than when that independent director is a man.

The greatest gains in independent directors — and, consequently, in gender diversity on boards — occurred between 2019 and 2021. The rate of change then dropped notably in 2022 and 2023. This timing tracks with two trends in the broader capital markets that influence recruitment of new directors.

• As the IPO market softened, urgency to build public-ready boards diminished.
  In the year or more leading up to a public offering, companies typically revisit board composition to meet SEC requirements, adding an audit chair and other independent directors. IPOs peaked in 2021 and fell dramatically in the two years following. As a result, fewer companies needed to prepare their boards for imminent public offerings.
• With limited access to private funding, CEO attention turned to profitability versus board-building. At the same time that the horizon for IPOs moved out, companies had a harder time raising additional private capital. According to an analysis of Crunchbase data, 2023 was the lowest year for U.S. venture funding since 2018. CEOs without adequate cash runways focused on the operational challenges of accelerating revenue growth and cutting expenses, rather than the strategic opportunity to build out their boards.

Concurrent with these market conditions, advocates for corporate board diversity — including State Street, Blackrock, Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and some state legislatures — began to face opposition as ESG and broader DEI initiatives became politicized. The effect, if any, of these new headwinds is less clear than the stifling effects of the capital markets in 2022 and 2023.

In fact, our most recent study points to hopeful trends on private company boards:

• Younger companies are more likely to have women directors.
  Among companies founded since 2015, 20% of board members are women, compared with 16% for companies founded before 2016. Additionally, only 22% of the newer companies have all-male boards, whereas 37% of the older companies don’t have any women in the boardroom.
• More women investors are taking board seats.
  The historic lack of gender diversity among funders has a downstream effect on private company boards where investors hold nearly half of the seats. Encouragingly, the percentage of investor-directors who are women increased from 5% in 2019 to 13% in our latest study.
• Fewer women are boardroom “Only’s.”
  Our study indicates that 30% of directors are the lone woman on their boards, down from 44% in 2020. This supports the notion that one of the key benefits of board diversity is expanding the board network to access new talent.

Adding independent directors provides private company boards with the opportunity to tap critical expertise, bring in new perspectives, and expand the reach of their networks. While companies have been slower to take advantage of this lever in the last two years, continued progress even in the midst of challenging capital markets suggests that boards recognize the long-term value of cognitive diversity.

Why this study?

When it comes to boardroom trends, numerous studies track public company boards, but high-growth private company boards have been largely overlooked. We launched our inaugural study in 2019 to fill this information gap.

Board diversity is important for public companies, but it’s also important for private companies.

Private companies surpass public companies in number, employ millions of people, and drive innovation. They are the public companies of the future. In fact, nearly half of the public companies founded since 1979 began as venture-backed startups. Yet years before they hit the public markets, private companies create the products and services and define the business models that will shape society for decades to come — a critical time period for cognitive diversity in corporate governance and oversight.

The composition and challenges for private company boards differ significantly from those of public company boards and therefore warrant special attention. Determining the mix of executive, investor and independent directors — and trends related to those types of board seats — is essential to understanding private company boards and is therefore a key focus of our research.

This 2023 study includes our largest sample to date:

• 735 U.S.-based private companies which have raised at least $100 million
• 4,992 board seats
• 4,321 individual board members

These boards govern companies which employ nearly 300,000 people and have raised $224 billion in investment.

Key findings

• Women hold 17% of board seats among the companies studied, up from 7% in our original study in 2019.
• Between 2019 and 2023, women gained two-thirds of a board seat (0.67); they now represent roughly 1.2 out of 6.8 board members.
• Nearly a third (32%) of companies don’t have any women on their boards, an improvement from 60% in 2019.
• 5% of all directors are women of color, up from 3% in 2020.
• 25% of company boards include a woman of color, up from 19% in 2020.
• Women hold 29% of independent director seats, 13% of investor director seats, and 10% of executive director seats.
• Companies with a woman as their first and only independent director have raised 16% more funding than those whose first and only independent director is a man.
• 30% of directors are the only women on their boards, down from 44% in 2020.
• Life sciences companies continue to outperform technology companies on all board-diversity metrics.

The percentage of women directors more than doubled since our inaugural study

Within the average private company board of 6.8 members, women hold 1.2 seats. This represents a significant gain from 2019 when women held just 0.5 seats but only a slight improvement from the 1.1 seats we reported last year. Women now make up 17% of the directors within high-growth private companies. By comparison, within public companies, women hold 33% of board seats among S&P 500 companies and 29% of board seats among the Russell 3000.

Over the span of our research, the prevalence of all-male boards has declined from 60% in 2019 to 32% in our latest study. Among public companies, all S&P 500 boards have included women directors since 2020.

Within our study, the 238 private companies governed by all-male boards represent more than $60 billion in cumulative funding and employ more than 86,000 people.

Research suggests that boards need at least three women directors to capture the full economic benefits of diversity, yet only 32% of boards have more than one, and just 12% have more than two. However, our study indicates that the percentage of board members who are the only woman in the boardroom has dropped to 30% from 44% in 2020. Notably the boardroom gains for women over the last year appear to have been driven by adding additional women to boards rather than introducing the first woman director to all-male boards.

The percent of women of color continues to rise

Women of color now hold 5% of the 4,992 board seats we studied. That’s an improvement from 3% in 2020, when directors named “Dave” outnumbered women of color in the boardroom.

An estimated 19% of private company board seats are held by men of color. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of the boards studied have at least one man of color on the board, while a quarter (25%) include a woman of color. The number of men of color (778) who are board directors exceeds the total number of women directors, regardless of race or ethnicity (760).

Though still the majority in the boardroom, investors hold fewer seats

Investor directors hold just under half (46%) of seats on the boards we studied, down significantly from 56% in our inaugural 2019 study. During that period, the average board size has remained essentially flat at just under seven members. The mix has shifted toward independent directors, who now hold 31% of board seats, up from 20% in 2019.

Private company board directors can be classified in three groups: executive directors, investor directors and independent directors. Executive directors include CEOs, co-founders and any other members of the company’s management team who hold board seats. These make up 23% of the board seats within the companies studied, consistent with our findings in prior years.

As private companies raise venture capital, investors often take seats on the board. Within the study data, investor directors have consistently made up the largest pool of board members, though the average number of investor seats per board has declined from 3.8 in 2019 to 3.1.

Independent directors are typically the last to be added to the board, as they are neither tied to the company’s founding management team nor early investors. Private companies are not required to have independent directors; however, public companies must have at least one independent director, depending on the size of the board.

The average number of independent directors on the boards studied has grown to 2.1 from 1.4 in 2019, offsetting the decrease in investor directors over that time. Despite this growth, 18% of these heavily funded private companies don’t have any independent directors on their board.

Independent director appointments drive boardroom gains for women

To some extent, the lack of gender diversity on private company boards is a downstream effect resulting from the lack of gender diversity among venture investors and the entrepreneurs they choose to fund, with the percentage of women in associate board seats roughly matching estimates of the percentage of woman check-writers and venture-backed founders. Thus, the increases we’ve observed in women-held executive and investor seats over the past five years — from 4% and 5%, respectively, to 10% and 13% — likely reflect the efforts of investment firms to be more inclusive in recruiting and funding talent.

Because investor and executive director seats are usually tied to funding dynamics, independent board seats often provide the most immediate opportunity to introduce more cognitive diversity into the boardroom. Women now hold 29% of independent director seats, up from 19% in 2019. These independent board appointments have been responsible for more than half (54%) of the board seats gained by women over the past five years.

Companies with a woman independent director have raised more money

Publicly available financial data for privately held companies is scant. Therefore, identifying associations between board composition and business performance is virtually impossible. However, one objective basis for comparison is the amount of cumulative funding raised by companies in our data.

Perhaps not surprisingly, companies with at least one independent director average 26% more in cumulative funding than those without an independent. Considering that independent directors are almost always the last of the three types of directors to be added to the board, the fact that those with an independent are better capitalized stands to reason.

Companies with at least one woman director have raised an average of 29% more than those without any women in the boardroom. Again, this may be explained by the fact that women directors are most likely to hold independent seats and be later-stage additions to the board.

However, our data offers an interesting basis for comparison: the gender of the independent director among companies with only one independent. We found that companies in which the only independent director is a woman out-raised those in which the only independent director is a man by 16% (an average of $303 million compared with $260 million). Interestingly, recent research on public company boards concluded that those with women directors commanded a 5% higher acquisition price.

Although our data can’t draw conclusions about a causal relationship between fundraising and women independents, it does suggest companies that receive greater funding may be those which prioritize bringing more diversity onto the board.

Life sciences companies lead technology companies in board diversity

The 735 company boards included in our study spanned all industries, with 48% in life sciences fields, 39% in non-health-related technology industries, and the remaining 13% in energy and other areas. Across all measures of board diversity, life sciences companies out-perform technology companies.

Women hold 21% of board seats among life sciences companies compared with 13% among tech companies. They hold 3x as many executive director seats and twice as many investor seats on life sciences boards than on tech boards. While the percentage of women holding independent seats is the same for life sciences and technology companies, the former tend to have more independents per board.

Looking at the percentage of all-male boards by industry highlights this disparity. While 41% of technology company boards are all men, this drops to 25% for life sciences companies.

Given the disparity in diversity metrics by industries, it’s worth noting that the fundraising patterns described above hold true across both life sciences and technology companies. Also, while the mix of industries within our study data has shifted slightly over the past five years, that shift alone explains only a small fraction of the change we’ve observed in blended-board diversity measures over time.

Younger companies have more diverse boards

Within our study of boards founded since 2004, 39% got their start after 2015. These younger firms have a higher percentage of women directors (20%) compared with older firms (16%). They are also less likely to have men-only boards (22%) than firms founded before 2016 (37%). Much of this disparity is due to the fact that younger companies are more likely to have women investors on their boards. Within these companies 17% of investor director seats are held by women, compared with 10% for the older companies.

Summary

The five years of data we’ve now accumulated tracking private company boards have revealed steady, if not always swift, progress in shifting the bodies that govern these companies to incorporate a broader diversity of thought, perspective and life experience.

The appointment of independent board directors is the most expedient way to bring new talent into the boardroom, including not only demographic diversity but also operating experience, key competencies and relevant expertise. While market conditions have made board recruitment both less urgent due to longer IPO horizons and a lower priority due to cash constraints, hopeful trends suggest that progress will accelerate as macroeconomic conditions continue to improve.

Him For Her, a social impact venture, was created to reduce the friction for CEOs looking to build their boards and extend their networks by connecting them with outstanding candidates who bring expertise and perspectives critical to companies’ success.

Data in this study points to the good news that once boards include a critical mass of women and people of color, the challenge of board diversity can be solved in perpetuity as boards expand their access to new networks.

Methodology

This tracking update largely reproduced the methodology employed with our prior studies published in December 2019, March 2021, March 2022 and March 2023. For this update, we analyzed 735 of the most heavily funded private U.S.-based companies to understand the composition of their boards as of Q4 2023 — one year after the prior study and four years after the original.

Leveraging the Crunchbase database, we identified 2,848 U.S.-based private companies founded since 2003 with cumulative funding of at least $100 million as of June 30, 2023. To ensure that each company’s board profile was current, we included only companies that publish their board of directors on their website.

We then referenced company website data, Crunchbase profiles and other publicly available information to characterize the board members. The study included only board directors; board observers and/or advisers were excluded from the data set. For each company, we segmented board members according to type of board seat: executive, investor or independent. In the few cases in which founders and past executives remained on the board despite no longer having an operating role at the company, we classified them as “executive directors” in recognition of their original relationship to the company. We identified gender by referencing professional profiles on Crunchbase and, when not available, other sites. For racial/ethnic identity, we leveraged self-identification information where available and supplemented that with contextual information and visual identification. As reflected by U.S. Census Bureau data collection, people of color include Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino. Those with MENA backgrounds are not included among people of color.

About the authors

Him For Her is a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on corporate boards. To bridge the network gap responsible for the sparsity of women in the boardroom, Him For Her engages business luminaries and partners with 100+ leading private equity and venture capital firms to connect the world’s most talented “Hers” to board service. Drawing from its ever-growing referral-only talent network of 7000+ women, a third of whom are women of color, Him For Her introduces board-building companies to board-qualified candidates. More than one hundred board appointments have resulted directly from Him For Her introductions to date. Together with guest hosts like Scott Cook, Carmine Di Sibio, Robin Washington, and Eric Yuan, Him For Her also convenes roundtable discussions that extend networks for CEOs and current and aspiring board members. A 501c3 corporation, Him For Her operates through the generosity of its founding partners GV, IVP, L Catterton, Mayfield, Silver Lake Partners, SoftBank, Starboard Value and Tiger Global Impact Ventures, and supporters like Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Nasdaq and many others.

Crunchbase is the leading provider of private company prospecting and research solutions. Over 70 million users — including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors and market researchers — use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities. Companies all over the world rely on us to power their applications, making over 6 billion calls to our API each year. To learn more, visit about.crunchbase.com and follow us on Twitter @crunchbase.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Executive summary

As investors and other stakeholders put increasing pressure on public companies to build boards that better reflect society, the root cause that inhibits board diversity has become clearer. It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s a network problem. Boards have been over-reliant on their personal networks to source candidates. 

For high-growth private companies — the subject of our research — this problem is compounded by two structural issues.

First, the lack of diversity among investors and the entrepreneurs they back shapes the demographics of the boardroom. Our study found that men hold 88% of investor-director board seats and 91% of executive board seats.

Second, independent director seats — which provide companies with the opportunity to round out the board with directors who bring relevant operating experience and new perspectives — remain unfilled. Even though the organizational documents for venture-backed companies typically specify a number of independent board seats, nearly a fifth of the heavily funded, high-growth companies we studied don’t have a single independent director. Another quarter of the companies have only one. 

Encouragingly, the number of companies with independent directors is on the rise. Additionally, companies are adding independent directors at an earlier stage. Among the venture-backed companies to which Him For Her has introduced their newest board members, 69% of those were Series C or earlier. The expertise and fresh perspective these independent directors can provide should better position the companies to capitalize on the opportunities before them.

Why this study?

You can’t change what you can’t measure. Early in our work to accelerate gender diversity on corporate boards, we at Him For Her sought out benchmarks against which to measure progress. We found several studies tracking board diversity among public companies, but little data on the demographic composition of the boards of high-growth private companies.

Board diversity is important for public companies, but it’s equally important for the boards of these private companies. In fact, nearly half of public companies founded since 1979 began as venture-backed startups. Before they hit the public markets, private companies create the products and services, and define the business models that will shape society for decades to come. They surpass public companies in number and employ millions of people. And yet these future public companies have been largely overlooked when it comes to the composition of their boards.

In 2019, Him For Her teamed up with Crunchbase to benchmark private-company boards. Through our annual research and reporting, we examine board diversity among the most heavily funded private companies and explore the unique dynamics that shape their boardrooms.

This fourth annual study encompasses the boards of 667 companies, which represent nearly $200 billion in funding and employ more than 265,000 people. These boards include 4,035 individuals who hold 4,610 board seats.

Key findings

• Between 2019 and 2022, women gained an average of just over half a board seat (0.6); women now represent roughly 1 out of 7 board members.
• Women hold 16% of board seats among the companies studied, up from 14% in 2021 and 7% in our original study in 2019.
• Nearly a third (32%) of companies don’t have any women on their boards, an improvement from 39% in the prior year. The companies with all-male boards represent $56 billion in funding and employ more than 78,000 people.
• Only 4% of all directors are women of color,1 reflecting a slight improvement from 3% in the prior year. For the first time, the number of women of color surpassed the number of board members named “Dave.”
• More than three quarters of company boards (76%) do not include a single woman of color.
• Women are most likely to occupy an independent director seat (54%), as compared with an investor director (34%) or executive director (13%) seat.
• Investor directors hold fewer than half of board seats (47%, down from 56% in 2019), as independent directors command a larger board footprint (31%, up from 20% in 2019). 
• Companies with at least one woman on the board have raised an average of 16% more in cumulative funding than companies without any women board members.
• Life sciences companies outperform technology companies on board-diversity metrics. 

When we began our study in 2019, 60% of the company boards we examined were all men. Four years later, that has dropped to 32%. Despite this notable improvement, women still hold an average of only one seat on every seven-member board, and the pace of change is slowing. When life sciences companies, which tend to perform better on board-diversity measurements, are excluded, the diversity picture for technology companies looks even worse.

Women hold an average of one seat per seven-person board

For the first time since we launched our study in 2019, women averaged one full board seat per company. Men hold an average of six seats per board.

Over the last four years, women have gained just over half a seat (0.6) in the boardrooms of these high-growth companies. They now hold 16% of all board seats, up from 7% in 2019. Among public companies, women hold 32% of the director seats on the boards of S&P 500 companies and 28% on the boards of Russell 3000 companies.

Nearly a third of the companies studied (32%) don’t have any women on their boards. By comparison, among public companies, there are no all-male boards within the S&P 500 and only 2% within the Russell 3000.

In our study, the companies being governed by all-male boards represent more than $56 billion in funding and employ more than 78,000 people.

One-third of women directors are the only women in the boardroom. While research suggests that boards need at least three women to capture the full economic benefits of diversity, only 31% of companies studied have more than one, and just 9% have more than two.

Women of color now outnumber “Daves” in the boardroom

In our last study, we reported that there were roughly as many people named “Dave” or “David” (107) in the boardrooms we examined as there were women of color (110). In 2022, women of color gained nearly one percentage point among board directors, surpassing the number of Daves. 

Of the 4,610 board seats included in the study, an estimated 20% are held by men of color and only 4% by women of color, up from 3% the prior year. By comparison, within the S&P 500, 8% of directors are women of color. More than two-thirds (69%) of the private companies studied have at least one man of color on the board, while fewer than a quarter (24%) include a woman of color on their boards. The number of men of color (936) among the board directors studied exceeds the total number of women of all races and ethnicities (668).

Percentage of investor directors continues slow decline

When we began our study in 2019, investors held 56% of all board seats. Over the past four years, that share has decreased to 47%. During this period, the average board size has remained virtually unchanged at 6.9 members. 

Directors on private-company boards can be classified in three groups: executive directors, investor directors and independent directors. CEOs, co-founders and any members of the company’s management team who hold board seats are considered executive directors. These make up 23% of the board seats within the companies studied, consistent with our findings last year.

As venture-backed companies raise outside funding, investors often take seats on the board. Within the study data, investor directors make up the largest pool of board members for venture-backed companies.

Independent directors are typically the last to be added to the board, as they are neither tied to the company’s founding management team nor early investors. Private companies are not required to have independent directors; however, public companies must have at least one independent director, depending on the size of the board. 

As the percentage of investor directors has declined, the percentage of independent directors has increased to 31%, up from 20% in 2019. However, 17% of companies don’t have a single independent director on their board (down from 29% in 2019).

Boardroom gains have largely been driven through independent director appointments

Men hold the majority of board seats, regardless of type. The percentage of women holding executive director and investor director seats has increased modestly over the past four years. However, the greatest gains have been among independent directors, where women now hold 28% of seats, up from 19% in 2019. Since the study’s inception, women have gained an average of 0.6 board seats. More than half of this increase is due to the appointment of women as independent directors.

Combined, executive and investor directors hold 70% of board seats, of which only 11% are occupied by women. This gender imbalance reflects the downstream effect of the underrepresentation of women among both startup funders and founders.

Data reveal correlation between funding and women in the boardroom

Companies with at least one woman on the board raised an average of 16% more funding ($302 million) than companies without any women on the board ($261 million). They also have larger boards, with an average of 7.4 directors, compared with companies without women board members (6.0 directors).

This data suggests that, even among companies with a minimal cumulative raise of $100 million, those which have raised more funding have made more progress in building out their boards, appointing one or more independent directors by which they have brought more diversity into the boardroom.

Data also revealed a correlation between women on boards and IPOs. Among the companies examined in our 2021 study, those with at least one woman on the board were 10 times more likely to have gone public the following year than those with all-male boards. Of the 151 companies with at least one woman board member in 2021, 30 (20%) had gone public within the succeeding 12 months. Of the 101 companies with no women on the board, only 2 (2%) had gone public during the same time period.

The board diversity picture dims when life sciences companies are excluded

Among the 667 companies we studied, 46% (306) operate within computer technology-related industries and 40% (269) within the life sciences. Roughly half of the remaining 92 companies are in energy-related industries (45) and the remainder reflect a mix of other fields. 

Our research indicates that life sciences companies tend to have more diverse boards than technology companies. Life sciences companies have more women directors (19%, compared with 13%). Three out of four life sciences companies have at least one woman in the boardroom, compared with 61% of tech companies.

Women of color hold 5% of the seats on life science boards and 3% on tech boards. Nearly a third (30%) of life sciences companies have at least one woman of color on the board, compared with fewer than a fifth (19%) of tech companies.

These differences cannot be explained by board size. The average number of board members for life science and tech companies is similar (7.0 compared with 6.8, respectively). 

Summary

Among public companies, the all-male boardroom is becoming a thing of the past. Yet nearly a third of the private companies we studied remain governed entirely by men. Four years ago, that percentage of all-male boards was nearly twice as high. So clearly the trend toward more inclusive board recruitment that has been reshaping public boards is extending to younger companies. However, women remain dramatically underrepresented in these private company boardrooms, and the rate of change is slowing.

Our research points to two factors that inhibit board diversity among high-growth private companies:

• Lack of gender diversity among investors and the entrepreneurs they fund
• Lack of urgency in appointing independent board members

Additionally, the fact that only 28% of independent directors in place are women reflects an overreliance on existing networks to source candidates.

While gender diversity among investors and the founders they fund continues to slowly improve, independent board seats provide a more immediate way to introduce diversity of experience and perspective to the boardroom. Most CEOs and their boards recognize the value of independent directors, but the competing demands on a startup CEO can relegate this “important-but-not-urgent” opportunity to the back burner. 

Him For Her, a social impact venture, was created to remove the friction for CEOs looking to build their boards and extend their networks by connecting them with outstanding candidates who bring expertise and perspectives critical to companies’ success. 

The good news is that once boards include a critical mass of women and people of color, the challenge of board diversity will be solved in perpetuity as the board network expands to include people with a wider variety of life experiences.

Methodology

This tracking update largely reproduced the methodology employed with our prior studies published in December 2019, March 2021 and March 2022. For this update, we analyzed 667 of the most heavily funded private U.S.-based companies to understand the composition of their boards as of Q4 2022 — one year after the prior study and three years after the original.

Leveraging the Crunchbase database, we identified 2,626 U.S.-based private companies founded since 2003 with cumulative funding of at least $100 million as of June 30, 2022. To ensure that each company’s board profile was current, we included only companies that publish their board of directors on their website.

We then referenced company website data, Crunchbase profiles and other publicly available information to characterize the board members. The study included only board directors; board observers and/or advisers were excluded from the data set. For each company, we segmented board members according to type: executive, investor or independent. In the few cases in which founders and past executives remained on the board despite no longer having an operating role at the company, we classified them as “executive directors” in recognition of their original relationship to the company. We identified gender by referencing the professional profiles on Crunchbase. For racial/ethnic identity, we leveraged self-identification information where available, and supplemented with contextual information and visual identification. As reflected by U.S. Census data collection, people of color include Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino.

About the Authors

Him For Her is a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on corporate boards. To bridge the network gap responsible for the sparsity of women in the boardroom, Him For Her engages business luminaries and partners with leading private equity and venture capital firms to connect the world’s most talented “Hers” to board service. Drawing from its ever-growing referral-only talent network of 6,000+ women, a third of whom are women of color, Him For Her introduces board-building companies to board-ready candidates. More than 100 board appointments have directly resulted from Him For Her introductions to date. Together with guest hosts like Scott Cook, Carmine Di Sibio, Robin Washington and Eric Yuan, Him For Her also convenes roundtable discussions that extend networks for CEOs and current and aspiring board members. A 501c3 corporation, Him For Her operates through the generosity of its founding partners GV, IVP, L Catterton, Mayfield, Silver Lake Partners, SoftBank, Starboard Value and Tiger Global Impact Ventures, and supporters including Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Nasdaq and many others.

Crunchbase is the leading provider of private-company prospecting and research solutions. Over 70 million users — including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors and market researchers — use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities. Companies all over the world rely on us to power their applications, making over 6 billion calls to our API each year. To learn more, visit about.crunchbase.com and follow us on Twitter @crunchbase.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

Learn More

The study

When it comes to board diversity, public companies attract the most scrutiny. How do high-growth private companies—those often credited with driving technical innovation and disrupting established industries—fare in terms of diversity in the boardroom?

That’s what Him For Her set out to understand three years ago. In 2019, through a collaboration with Crunchbase and Kellogg School of Management Professor Lauren Rivera, we published the first of our annual tracking studies measuring diversity on the boards of the most heavily funded private companies. This report summarizes our findings for 2021, providing a third set of data points as we track progress and trends in private-company board composition. 

Included in this study are 500 companies, which represent nearly $140 billion in funding and more than 180,000 employees, and their combined 3,437 board members (3,042 unique people).

Key findings

• Women hold 14 percent of board seats among the companies studied, up from 11 percent in 2020 and 7 percent in 2019.
• Nearly 40 percent of companies don’t have any women on their board, an improvement from roughly half of the companies in our 2020 study and 60 percent in 2019.
• Only 3 percent of all directors are women of color, reflecting no significant change from the prior year.
• More than three quarters of company boards (78 percent) do not include a single woman of color.
• Women are most likely to occupy an independent director seat (56 percent), as compared with an investor director (31 percent) or executive director (13 percent) seat.
• Investor directors now hold less than half of board seats (48 percent, down from 56 percent in 2019), as independent directors command a larger board footprint (29 percent, up from 20 percent in 2019). 
• Life sciences companies outperform technology companies on board-diversity metrics. 

While our analysis points to continued progress in boardroom diversity among the private companies studied, the rate of change has slowed when it comes to gender diversity, and we observed no improvement for women of color.

In recognition of the mounting evidence connecting corporate performance with board diversity, investors such as State Street and Goldman Sachs, along with state legislatures in California and Washington are calling on businesses to include more women and people of other underrepresented groups in corporate governance. For companies and their stakeholders to realize the myriad benefits associated with board diversity— including increased innovation, greater financial returns and improved ESG performance—CEOs and board directors must make a commitment to sourcing diverse candidates unconstrained by the limited reach of their personal networks.

Women hold 1 in 7 board seats—fewer than one per company

The percentage of woman board members grew from 11 to 14 in 2021, though women gained fewer seats than in the year prior. Among public companies, women hold 30 percent of the director seats on the boards of S&P 500 companies and 26 percent on the boards of Russell 3000 companies.

For the first time, more than half (61 percent) of the companies studied have at least one woman on their board, leaving nearly 2 in 5 without any gender diversity. Among the Russell 3000, only 3 percent of boards are all-male. 

Within our study, the companies being governed by all-male boards represent more than $50 billion in funding and employ roughly 90,000 people. 

The average number of women per board remains less than one. More than half (58 percent) of women directors are the only woman in the boardroom. While research suggests that boards need at least three women to capture the full economic benefits of diversity, only 25 percent have more than one and just 9 percent have more than two.

Among board members studied, as many are named David as are women of color

Of the 3,437 board seats included in the study, approximately 19 percent are held by men of color and only 3 percent by women of color. By comparison, within the S&P 500, 10 percent of directors are women of color. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of companies studied have at least one man of color on the board, while fewer than a quarter (22 percent) include a woman of color on their boards. The number of men of color (594) among the board directors studied exceeds the total number of women of all races and ethnicities (436). 

Notably, among the board members included in our study, roughly as many are named “Dave” or “David” (107) as are women of color (110).

Investor directors now hold fewer than half of board seats

While the average board size remained essentially unchanged at 6.9 members, compared with 6.8 in each of the prior years’ studies, the mix of directors by role shifted.

Directors on private-company boards can be classified in three groups: executive directors, investor directors and independent directors. CEOs, co-founders and any members of the company’s management team who hold board seats are considered executive directors. These make up 23 percent of the board seats within the companies studied, consistent with our findings last year.

As venture-backed companies raise outside funding, investors often take seats on the board. Within the study data, investor directors make up the largest pool of board members for venture-backed companies, with 48 percent of seats, down from 53 percent in 2020 and 56 percent in 2019.

Independent directors are typically the last category to be added to the board, as they are neither tied to the company’s founding management team nor early investors. Private companies are not required to have independent directors; however, public companies must have at least one independent director, depending on the size of the board. Independent directors comprise 29 percent of the seats among the private companies studied, up from 25 percent in 2020 and 20 percent the year prior. The number of boards with at least one independent director grew from 71 percent in 2019 to 83 percent in 2021.

Gain in independent seats furthered gender diversity

Most woman board directors hold independent seats (56 percent). While the number of women in executive director and investor director seats has grown modestly over the last two years, women saw the greatest gains within independent seats, from 19 percent women in 2019 to 27 percent women in 2021. 

Combined, executive and investor directors hold 71 percent of board seats, of which only 9 percent are occupied by women. This gender imbalance reflects the underrepresentation of women among both startup funders and founders, with the downstream effect apparent in the boardroom.

With the addition of an independent director, companies have the freedom to select candidates who bring both key expertise and new perspectives. The increase in the percentage of independent board seats was a contributing factor to boardroom gains for women over the last year.

Life-sciences companies have slightly more diverse boards

Among the companies studied, nearly equal numbers operate within life sciences (225) and technology (228), with the remaining 47 companies predominantly in energy-related fields. The boards of life-sciences companies fare better on diversity metrics than the boards of technology companies.

Within the life-science companies, 17 percent of board directors are women and 70 percent of boards include at least one woman. By comparison, among technology companies, only 11 percent of directors are women and 54 percent of boards include a woman.

Summary

We are encouraged to see continued progress in diversity within the boardrooms of the most heavily funded private companies. Yet celebrating the fact that women hold 1 in 7 directorships when they account for roughly a quarter of corporate C-suite roles—nearly half of the U.S. workforce—and half of all consumers, ignores the gaping hole in corporate governance. 

Even more concerning, the pace of improvement is slowing. Our annual tracking study revealed greater gains for women between 2019 and 2020 than over the past year. Additionally, as more companies add their first woman director, a “one and done” mentality may counteract the broader tailwinds driving change. 

Meanwhile, our study indicated no improvement in the sliver of board seats held by women of color.

Building diverse boards requires a novel approach to board recruitment. Boards look the way they do today because new directors are typically tapped from the personal networks of those already in the boardroom. Because our personal networks tend to look like we do, this practice creates a self-reinforcing cycle that inadvertently excludes women and people of color. As a result, business leaders literally cannot see the wealth of talent that lies beyond the peripheral vision of their existing relationships.

CEOs and their boards can build more diverse boards by:

• Prioritizing the addition of an independent director earlier in the company’s lifecycle.
• Focusing on expertise rather than title; requiring that a candidate have CEO experience automatically favors men, whereas defining specific criteria, such as size of P&L or scaling experience, yields a broader pool of qualified candidates.
• Building a diverse pipeline of candidates by identifying sources outside the personal networks of those in the boardroom today.

The good news: It’s a network problem, not a pipeline problem. Business leaders committed to building diverse boards will not lack for impressive candidates if they look in the right places.

Him For Her, a social impact venture, was created to make it easy for companies to identify outstanding candidates who bring expertise and perspectives critical to companies’ success. We look forward to a time when board diversity becomes so commonplace that tracking is no longer necessary.

Methodology

This tracking update largely reproduced the methodology employed with our prior studies published in December 2019 and March 2020. For this update, we analyzed 500 of the most heavily funded private U.S.-based companies to understand the composition of their boards as of Q4 2021, one year after the prior study and two years after the original.

Leveraging the Crunchbase database, we identified 1,950 U.S.-based private companies founded since 2003 with cumulative funding of at least $100 million as of June 30, 2021. To ensure that each company’s board profile was current, we included only companies that publish their board of directors on their website.

We then referenced company website data, Crunchbase profiles and other publicly available information to characterize the board members. The study included only board directors; board observers and/or advisers were excluded from the data set. For each company, we segmented board members according to type: executive, investor or independent. In the few cases in which founders and past executives remained on the board despite no longer having an operating role at the company, we classified them as “executive directors” in recognition of their original relationship to the company. We identified gender by referencing the professional profiles on Crunchbase. For racial/ethnic identity, we leveraged self-identification information where available, and supplemented with contextual information and visual identification. As reflected by U.S. Census data collection, people of color include Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino.

About the Authors

Him For Her is a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on corporate boards. To bridge the network gap responsible for the sparsity of women in the boardroom, Him For Her engages business luminaries to connect the world’s most talented “Hers” to board service. Since its founding in 2018, Him For Her has built a referral-only talent network of 4500+ board-ready women, more than a third of whom are women of color, and provided free board referrals to 800+ companies ranging from start-ups to S&P 100. Him For Her creates warm introductions between board candidates and CEOs through more than 100 roundtable discussions guest-hosted by renowned leaders such as Scott Cook, Carmine Di Sibio, Robin Washington, Eric Yuan and many more. A 501c3 corporation, Him For Her provides its services free of charge thanks to supporters like Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Nasdaq and others.

Crunchbase is the leading provider of private-company prospecting and research solutions. Over  70 million users — including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors  and market researchers — use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities. And companies all over the world rely on us to power their applications, making over 6 billion calls to our API each year. To learn more, visit about.crunchbase.com/ and follow us on Twitter @crunchbase.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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The Study

Publicly traded companies have faced increasing scrutiny regarding the demographic composition of their boards of directors. Investors, state legislators and, most recently, Nasdaq are advocating for increased diversity in the boardroom, with an emphasis on adding women and people of color. Tracking reports produced by Equilar, Spencer Stuart and others monitor the slow but notable progress in the composition of public company boards.

By contrast, board diversity data for privately held companies is sparse, as they aren’t required to disclose their board membership. In 2019, Him For Her, Crunchbase and Kellogg School of Management Professor Lauren Rivera undertook the first benchmarking study to look at gender diversity on the boards of the most heavily funded U.S.-based private venture-backed companies. Using those findings as a baseline, we updated the study one year later, this time including a preliminary look at racial diversity as well. 

Key Findings

Following our baseline study of 2019, our analysis of the composition of the boards of some of the most heavily funded private companies points to modest progress when it comes to gender diversity:

• In 2020, 49 percent of companies did not have a woman on the board, an improvement from 60 percent a year earlier;
• Women held 11 percent of board seats, up from 7 percent;
• Executives and investors compose 75 percent of director seats (down from 80 percent), of which 8 percent are held by women (up from less than 5 percent); and
• Woman directors remain most likely to hold an independent seat on the board: Their share of those seats remains relatively unchanged at 20 percent (from 19 percent).

Our initial analysis of racial and ethnic diversity revealed that:

• Only 3 percent of board seats were held by women of color, compared with an estimated 18 percent held by men of color1; and
• 81 percent of companies don’t have a woman of color on the board at all.

By tracking board diversity among private companies, we hope to highlight the need to engage more women — with an emphasis on women of color  — in board service, and to inspire CEOs and their boards to source a diverse slate of candidates for open board positions.

Nearly half of private company boards are all male

Compared with our 2019 baseline, gender diversity among the private-company boards studied improved notably, with 51 percent of boards now including at least one woman director, up from 40 percent the year prior. By comparison, 100 percent of S&P 500 companies and 93 percent of Russell 3000 companies’ boards include women directors.

Of the more than 350 private-company boards analyzed, 49 percent (175) still lack a single woman in the boardroom — a gap that, at this rate, will take another five years to fill.

Only 11 percent of board seats are held by women

The ratio of men to women in private-company boardrooms is roughly 9-to-1. Of the 2,457 board seats included in this study, 11 percent (275) were held by a woman, up from 7 percent one year prior. At this rate, it will take a decade for private company boards to achieve gender parity.

Again, public companies are further along, with women holding 28 percent of director seats among S&P 500 companies and 23 percent among Russell 3000 companies.

Most women directors are “onlys”

Among the roughly half of boards that include any women, 66 percent include just one woman. While that’s an improvement from 76 percent in last year’s study, most women board members remain the only woman in the boardroom. Only 18 percent of the boards studied included two or more women. While research suggests that boards need at least three women to capture the full economic benefits of diversity, only 6 percent of the companies studied met this criteria.

Fewer than 5 percent of board seats are held by women of color

Our preliminary analysis of racial and ethnic data revealed that women of color hold only 3 percent of seats on the boards of the most heavily funded privately held companies. By comparison, our study suggests men of color hold 18 percent of seats. Among the country’s largest companies, a 2018 study of Fortune 500 boards found 5.8 percent of directors were “minority women.” Fewer than 1 in 5 of the companies studied had a single woman of color in the boardroom.

Investors hold more than half of private-company board seats

Directors on private-company boards can be classified in three groups: executive directors, investor directors and independent directors. CEOs, co-founders and any members of the management team who hold board seats are considered executive directors, which make up 22 percent of the board seats within the companies studied, down from 24 percent last year.

As venture-backed companies raise outside funding, investors often take seats on the board. Within the study data, investor directors make up the largest pool of board members for venture-backed companies, with 53 percent of seats, down from 56 percent last year.

Independent directors are typically the last category to be added to the board, as they are neither tied to the company’s founding management team nor early investors. Private companies are not required to have independent directors; however, public companies must have at least one independent director or more, depending on the size of the board. With 25 percent of the seats among the private companies studied, independents make up the smallest cohort, though this segment has grown from 20 percent last year.

Gain in independent seats furthered gender diversity

Women are most likely to hold independent seats. Among the women directors in our study, 45 percent were independent directors, while 40 percent were investors, and 15 percent were executives. The increase in the percentage of independent board seats were a contributing factor to boardroom gains for women over the last year.

Still, women held only one in five independent seats. Additionally, 58 (16 percent) of the heavily funded companies studied didn’t have a single independent director on the board. The portion of companies without an independent board member declined markedly from 29 percent last year, suggesting an increased commitment to adding independents and, perhaps, demographic diversity.

By contrast, women of color are more likely to hold investor director seats. Among the albeit small data set, 48 percent of the woman directors of color were investors, compared with 40 percent independents and 12 percent executives.

California companies with IPO aspirations have work to do to comply with board-diversity law

California legislation mandates that the boards of public companies based in the state include a minimum number of women (SB 826) and people of underrepresented groups (AB 979) by the deadlines provided. Among the companies we studied, 184 (51 percent) are headquartered in California and, were they to become public — either through an IPO, de-SPAC or direct listing — would be subject to penalties if their boards did not meet these requirements.

Half of the California companies studied met the minimum requirements for gender representation by the 2019 deadline, up from 44 percent in the last study. Only 12 percent met the gender criteria for the 2021 deadline. Data regarding compliance with the requirements of AB979 wasn’t available within our data set, but the lack of racial diversity among the boards studied suggests that companies bound for the public markets have significant work to be done when it comes to board composition.

Summary

One year after our original benchmark study, data indicates modest progress in increasing demographic diversity among privately held companies. However the voices of women — and especially women of color — remain rare in the boardrooms of the country’s most heavily funded private companies. 

Observations drawn from our study include:

• At the current rate of change, we can’t expect to see a woman on the board of every later-stage private company until 2025, and gender parity is a full decade away.
• Efforts to address gender diversity need to include a commitment to women of color. 
• Independent board seats offer the most immediate opportunity to increase board diversity, and anecdotal evidence suggests a growing commitment to appointing independents at an earlier stage and with a preference for demographic diversity. 

While the progress revealed through this tracking study is encouraging, the lack of diversity among even the most heavily funded private-company boards is a stark reminder of the work still to be done. Continued commitment must be made to include more women — with an eye toward those from different racial, ethnic and other underrepresented groups. Boards can improve diversity by adding independent directors at an earlier stage and drawing from a diverse candidate pool sourced beyond the personal networks of sitting directors. 

As countless studies have shown, diverse boards deliver better outcomes for all stakeholders. Given the outsized role that venture-backed private companies play in driving innovation, diversity in their corporate governance is a social imperative. 

Methodology

This tracking update largely reproduced the methodology for our original benchmarking study published in December 2019. For this update, we analyzed 359 of the most heavily funded private U.S.-based companies to understand the composition of their boards as of Q3 2020, one year after the original study. 

Leveraging the Crunchbase database, we identified 1,295 U.S.-based private companies founded since 2003 with cumulative funding of at least $100 million as of June 30, 2020. To ensure that each company’s board profile was current, we included only companies that publish their board of directors on their website. 

We then referenced company website data, Crunchbase profiles and other publicly available information to characterize the board members. The study included only board directors; board observers and/or advisers were excluded from the data set. For each company, we segmented board members according to type: executive, investor or independent. In the few cases in which founders and past executives remained on the board despite no longer having an operating role at the company, we classified them as “executive directors” in recognition of their original relationship to the company. We identified gender by referencing the professional profiles on Crunchbase. For racial/ethnic identity, we leveraged self-identification information where available, and supplemented with contextual information and visual identification. As reflected by U.S. Census data collection, people of color include Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino. 

About the Authors

Him For Her

Him For Her is a social impact venture aimed at accelerating diversity on corporate boards. To bridge the network gap responsible for the sparsity of women in the boardroom, Him For Her engages business luminaries to connect the world’s most talented “Hers” to board service. Since its founding in 2018, Him For Her has built a referral-only talent network of 2500+ board-ready women, a third of whom are women of color, and delivered free board-referral lists to 450+ companies ranging from start-ups to S&P 100. Him For Her creates warm introductions between board candidates and CEOs through its series of small events guest-hosted by renowned leaders such as Stacy Brown-Philpot, Danny Meyer, Brian Moynihan, Eric Yuan and many more. A 501c3 corporation, Him For Her provides its services free of charge thanks to supporters like Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Weiner, Nasdaq and others.

Crunchbase

Crunchbase is the leading provider of private-company prospecting and research solutions. Over 55 million users — including salespeople, entrepreneurs, investors  and market researchers — use Crunchbase to prospect for new business opportunities. And companies all over the world rely on us to power their applications, making over 3 billion calls to our API each year. To learn more, visit about.crunchbase.com/ and follow us on Twitter @crunchbase.

Illustration: Dom Guzman