4 March 2022 
Initial evidence: DEI improves with DEI transparency. Improving gender and race/ethnicity representation among corporate leaders and boards of directors has become an important goal for firms, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Richard Benton and Eunmi Mun from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have just published the new Illinois Corporate Board Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation Report 2021.
Like last year, Denominator has delivered the benchmarking data for this report and it seems Illinois Public Act 101-0589 of 2019, which requires public corporations to report gender and race/ethnicity composition of their board members, is starting to have an effect.
The 2021 report shows that 80% of the companies listed two or more female directors, compared with 67% in the 2020 report. In 2021, 50% of companies reported having two or more non-white directors, compared with 35% in 2020. These are significant increases in just one year!
At Denominator, we believe standardized and quantifiable transparency within DEI is the key to improving DEI across companies and countries – and the report’s findings seem to support our belief.
We are happy to see our data being used in a report like this and encourage more research and data transparency in the area. If you are interested in what kind of data we can deliver to research projects, please reach out to us on info@denominator.one.
You can find the full report here and Chicago Sun Times’ article here.
