12 March 2024 
A new Moody’s Ratings report from Moody’s Investor Services (MIS) finds that board gender diversity correlates with credit quality in advanced economics.
For the second year, Denominator provided data on 3,100 Moody’s rated companies to investigate the correlation between board gender diversity and credit quality globally.
Key results
- Investment-grade companies have a higher proportion of women on boards, with an average of 29%
- In Europe and North America, board gender diversity has modestly improved
- Service and consumer sectors, such as insurance, retail, business products, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and consumer products, generally have a higher proportion of women on boards
- Companies with positive governance issuer profile scores (G-1) have seen an increase in women’s board representation from 31% to 34%
- North American investment-grade companies have greater racial and ethnic diversity on boards
Alongside of the report, a new episode of Moody’s Talk: the Big Picture podcast was released. In the episode titled Narrowing gender gaps in labour markets and on boards will strengthen credit quality, Ana Rayes, VP-Senior Analyst at Moody’s Investors Service and Dawn Holland, Director-Economic Research at Moody’s Analytics discussed the findings with host William Foster, Senior Vice President at Moody’s Investors Service.
The report was part of Moody’s International Women’s Day (IWD) champaign together with the following content:
- Moody’s Analytics research: Narrowing the Gender Participation Gap
- Moody’s Investors Service Sustainable Finance: Sustainable Finance – Global: Government policies, market innovation to spur more gender-related bond issuance
