Today (March 8) we honor International Women's Day. And even though we think diversity in all aspects should be celebrated every day, today, we would like to take the opportunity to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women globally.
For some time now, we have chosen this day to update our network on how we are progressing towards our goal of reaching an equal representation of gender across all levels in our investee companies. See our update from 2022 here.
Since our last update A&D companies have continued to take steps forward in appointing women in key leadership roles. The companies have also made progress on overall gender diversity and improved the gender balance amongst employees. Unfortunately, when it comes gender diversity in boards the development has been slightly negative in percentage points, even though the absolute number of women serving as board members in A&D companies have increased during the year.
Currently in the A&D Family, 43% of total employees are women (up from 41% in 2022), among senior management the average number of women is 33% (up from 31% in 2022) and the percentage of board seats held by women is 26% (down from 27% in 2022). Unfortunately we do not have enough data on other gender identities but we are actively working on making these surveys more gender-inclusive in the future.
When it comes to the A&D team itself, we are proud to say that 55% of full-time employees are women and that our investment team has a 50/50 gender split.
We are convinced that diverse companies do better and we will continue to encourage our investee companies to aim for diversity in all aspects. Including, but not limited to, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. In the Board of Directors, in senior management and among individual contributors.
If you want to learn more about what we do as a team to do better for the companies we have invested in and for our communities, please read more here.
/ Your A&D team