Activist investors leave company boards more white, more male

Shareholder activists say they shake up companies by adding better ideas. What they don’t add, it turns out, is women. Or people of color.

Firms targeted by activists end up with more white men on their boards, often replacing women and minorities in the process, according to a study by proxy voting firm ISS. The researchers looked at 380 board seats spread across 93 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 1500 Index targeted by activists between 2011 and 2015.

A Bloomberg analysis of the same period found that five of the biggest U.S. activist funds sought 174 board positions on Standard & Poor’s 500 companies in the same period, but nominated women only seven times.

MBA BY THE BAY: See how an MBA could change your life with SFGATE's interactive directory of Bay Area programs.

The ISS study — which looked at directors nominated by dissidents and by the boards themselves in response to activism — found that women made up 8.4 percent of this group, compared with 25 percent of new directors at all S&P 1500 companies in 2015. People of color accounted for fewer than 5 percent, compared with 13 percent of new S&P 1500 directors that year.

The decline is notable especially because it came during a period when women and people of color increased their board representation overall. “It’s a serious anomaly,” said Jon Lukomnik, executive director of the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute, which financed the research. “In an activist situation, diversity seems to be left off the list. Activists have not been considering diversity — and they should.”

Meanwhile, institutional investors are demanding greater inclusion, often citing research that shows diverse groups make better decisions and lead to greater profitability. BlackRock, State Street and others have promised to vote against boards that fail to address gender balance.

“Some of these things get forgotten when activism enters the scene,” said Patrick McGurn, ISS’s head of strategic research and one of the study’s authors. “It should be of concern to investors, and for the board it may be an opportunity lost.”

Because many boards have few women or minority members to start with, activist campaigns leave some companies with a group of directors that’s entirely male, entirely white or both. The percentage of all-male boards increased to 17 percent from 13 percent. During the same period, the share of companies in the S&P 1500 with exclusively male directors declined by 13 percentage points.

The percentage of boards with at least one minority director also decreased, dropping to 52 percent from 56 percent. That compares with 57 percent in the S&P 1500 overall.

The report didn’t speculate as to why activist action seems to push out women and minorities. But most of the dissidents are white men from the hedge fund industry, and their network of board nominees may come from “a good old boys network,” said Lukomnik. “Many activists have repeat nominees and they tend to be non-diverse.”

Laura Colby is a Bloomberg writer. Email: lcolby@bloomberg.net