The NYC Comptroller/NYC Pension Funds' Boardroom Accountability Project 2.0-triggered "Best Practices" in Board Matrices highlights 18 companies' board matrices disclosed in their 2018 proxy statements - all of which include individual director qualifications & skills, six of which include individual director voluntarily-disclosed gender and race/ethnicity, and 12 of which reflect aggregated (board-level) gender and/or race/ethnicity diversity information. Many also include director age and tenure on either an individual or collective basis. The 18 companies whose disclosures are included in the compendium as best practice examples are among the 151 portfolio companies targeted by the Boardroom Accountability Project 2.0 last Fall.
The release explains:
The detailed information highlighted in this compendium helps to provide investors what they need in order to vote on individual directors and thereby boards as a whole.
The Office of the New York City Comptroller believes the “best practices” disclosures included in this compendium stand out for explaining how the companies’ directors are each uniquely qualified to serve on their boards and that their boards have gender and racial/ethnic diversity without asking their investors to make assumptions about how their directors self-identify based on photographs or the spelling of their names.
Note also that, further to the sample letter included with the launch of the Project (reported on here) - but in a departure from past practice, the NYC Comptroller's Office is now insisting on independent director involvement in its engagements on this topic.