Making the San Diego region the best place to live and work means ensuring our workforce has what it needs to be successful. An important part of that is looking at who is leading our companies and organizations and making sure our leadership is diverse and gender-balanced.

It’s why we have created the All Our Talent: Women on Boards and Commissions initiative, an effort of the San Diego Regional Chamber Foundation with support from Mine The Gap, focused on addressing the need for more women on corporate, nonprofit, and government-appointed boards & commissions in our region.

Why This Focus

Women represent nearly half of the U.S. workforce yet continue to be significantly underrepresented in leadership roles. Women represent a quarter of C-Suite executive positions and 26% of board seats for the largest 3,000 companies in the U.S. In California, women now hold 29.6% of board seats for publicly held companies headquartered here. Thanks to efforts like All Our Talent and SB826, women in San Diego now hold 31% of public company board seats, up from 12% in 2018.

Research shows that organizations perform better, are more successful, and have a competitive advantage when they are driven by diverse and gender-balanced leadership. In 2018, the state of California took steps to affect change in this space with the first-in-the-nation law requiring publicly held companies to put women on their boards of directors.

Global research shows that companies with a critical mass of women on their boards are significantly more profitable. Credit Suisse conducted a six-year global research study showing that women on boards improve business performance for key metrics, including stock performance; companies with women directors on their boards outperformed shares of comparable businesses with all-male boards by 26 percent. Likewise, a 2016 study by Morgan Stanley Capital International found that United States companies with three or more female directors reported earnings that were 45 percent higher than those companies with no female directors.

But it’s not purely about economic success. Companies are more innovative and nimble when women and men are leading together. Varied perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds bring robust analysis, thoughtful workplace policies, and enhanced decision-making.

DIG DEEPER

Report and Landscape Analysis

Learn about the state of women on boards and commissions locally and the disparities and barriers in our region’s leadership.

State Symposium Best Practices

Read our op-ed series on best practices to increase gender equity at the board level gathered from the June 2021 statewide symposium.

Event Recordings

View recordings of our previous events including the Board Profile Workshop, State Symposium, and Legislative Summit.

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