The number of women sitting at the table in corporate boardrooms across the country is rising very slowly—but it’s rising, a study by the corporate research firm Equilar says.
As The Associated Press reports, just over 15% of all director seats at publicly traded U.S. companies were held by women as of Dec. 31. That’s up from 14% a year earlier and from 12% in 2013.
The trend is toward more equal representation on boards, but parity won’t happen until the end of 2055 unless the pace picks up, according to Equilar. That’s nearly 40 years away, which may be about when girls born today begin sitting on corporate boards.
Some 738 companies still have no women on their boards. Last year, nearly 60 companies that had no female directors since at least 2011 added one or more women.
Even so, it’s still much easier to find a woman in the boardroom than in the corner office, according to a separate, global survey of 3,400 companies by Credit Suisse. While women occupied nearly 15% of board seats at the end of 2015, only about 4% of CEOs are women.
Companies in other countries have gotten closer to gender parity than the United States, and government pressure has played a big role. Several European countries have set quotas and targets for how many corporate board members should be held by women. That’s why women held 24% of European board seats at the end of 2015, the highest rate in the world.
