Women in the Boardroom: 2022 Update

Is the world making reasonable progress towards increasing the proportion of women on boards? The data indicates not. Women occupy just 20% of board seats globally, and continue to be excluded from the highest levels of corporate leadership.

In 2011, when the Deloitte Global Boardroom Program began researching how many women served on corporate boards globally, the conversation about achieving gender equity among the highest leadership ranks was just starting to percolate. Since then, increasing women’s representation at the boardroom table has become something of a movement: More and more countries have developed initiatives to address gender parity, the conversation has vastly expanded, and, consequently, numbers have risen. Some countries, such as France, have really upped their numbers in a substantial way following government-mandated gender quotas. More than 40% of board seats among French companies are now occupied by women.

Deloitte’s report this year showed that progress is happening, albeit slowly. The global average of women on boards sits at just under 20% (19.7%), an increase of just 2.8 percentage points since the last report, published in 2019 [1] (figure 1). At this pace, the world will not reach parity until at least 2045, over twenty years from now. While this is still unacceptably slow, the pace of change has accelerated slightly: Deloitte’s last report showed parity being reached by 2052, indicating a timeline that has been reduced by almost a decade.