Diversity

Women on boards

In 2020, Switzerland’s National Council approved a legal amendment to board gender targets that established a gender quota for boards (30% women) and executive committees (20% women) for publicly listed companies with more than 250 employees.

We now see a clear uptick in female board representation at 33% and marking a 22% increase from 2021. The same upwards trend is seen on executive committees, where women now account for 17% of the seats, representing a 55% increase from 2021.

It is also encouraging to see that there has been a sharp increase in the number of companies where the board has met the gender quota.

	SMI Expanded	SMI	SMI Mid
Female board directors	33%	34%	31%
Female ExCo members	17%	19%	15%
Female chairs	3	1 (Logitech)	2 (Galenica; Swatch Group)
% of boards reaching 30% gender representation quota	69%	80%	61%
Change from 2021 on 30% gender representation	+64%	+78%	+70%

26% of the SMI Expanded companies achieved both quotas. 43% of the cohort achieved the board quota and not the executive committee quota, and 8% of the companies met the executive quota but not the board quota. 23% met neither quota. 

	Less than 20% executive representation	More than 20% executive representation
Less than 30% board representation	43%	26%
More than 30% board representation	23%	8%

69% of the companies in the sample have reached the quota for female representation in the boardroom, and all of them have at least one female director.

Zurich Insurance is the only company where, at the 31 May 2022 research cut-off date, female directors (six directors) outnumber their male counterparts (five), although both chair and vice-chair positions are occupied by men.

Both Credit Suisse and Adecco Group have an equal number of men and women on their board.

While the number of female non-executives has been rising steadily, the same cannot be said for the four most senior positions on the board, which remain dominated by men.

In reviewing the data, we did not note any board member on the SMI Expanded identifying as non-binary. This analysis is therefore structured in binary terms.

Gender distribution on committees

As encouraging as the general trend is, we found that women remain underrepresented in committee chair roles.

Only in remuneration committees (35%) have women reached a level of representation that reflects their board membership (33%). Audit, nomination, risk, and all other committees still trail several years behind when it comes to female committee chairs; all the more so considering the gender ratios on these committees.

The proportion of women non-executives chairing audit committees grew from the 22% recorded in our last review, to 25%, with 12 women in total. Seven companies have audit committees composed of a female majority; Adecco Group leads the list with 75% female representation, unchanged from 2021.

Turning to remuneration committees, in the SMI female non-executives account for 35% (up from 34% in 2021) of members and 35% (up from 27%) of chair roles. Although the proportion of women chairing nomination committees has increased to 22% from 13% in 2021, the number remains low compared with the proportion of female non-executive directors or female nomination committee members.

Foreign directors

We define foreign directors as having a nationality that differs from that of the company. When discussing the data with representatives of SMI Expanded companies, we noticed that Swiss dual-national directors are counted as Swiss by some and as foreign by others. Hence, we opted to examine this group separately.

The SMI has a much higher ratio of foreign directors, whereas SMI Mid companies appoint a similar number of Swiss and foreign directors. In both cases, Swiss dual-national directors with global experiences and worldviews remain in high demand.

	Swiss	Swiss dual-nationals	Foreign
SMI	30%	10%	60%
SMI Mid	45%	7%	48%
SMI Expanded	38%	9%	53%

• Dufry has only foreign directors
• Galenica, Geberit, and Swatch Group boards have no foreign directors.

When looking at chairs, foreign chairs represent 35% of the SMI, reaching 25% in the SMI Mid. The trend is more pronounced for the CEO role: 60% of SMI CEOs and 48% of CEOs on the SMI Mid are foreign.