Why Facebook Needs Women on its Board

Apr 11, 2012 9:15 PM ET

Why Facebook Needs Women on its Board

This post was originally published on Triple Pundit and the CSRHub blog.

By Carol Pierson Holding

As has been widely reported, Facebook – the social media company about to go public and possibly become the world’s 5th largest company – has no female board members.  Putting aside moral objections, why is this so terrible? Because it limits the company’s profitability, curbs innovation and, scariest for investors and employees, increases the risk of a meltdown.

My sponsor CSRHub is adding a positive screen for companies with female board members. The company’s founders, Bahar Gidwani and Cynthia Figge believe, as do most sustainability focused consumers and investors, that female board members make for stronger companies, and they want to give consumers a method for identifying which companies satisfy this criteria.

Read the full article on corporate governance and women leaders at CSRHub >>

 

Carol Pierson Holding writes on environmental issues and social responsibility for policy and news publications, including the Carnegie Council's Policy Innovations, Harvard Business Review, San Francisco Chronicle, India Time, The Huffington Post and many other web sites. Her articles on corporate social responsibility can be found on CSRHub.com, a website that provides sustainability ratings data on 5,000 companies worldwide. Carol holds degrees from Smith College and Harvard University.

CSRHub provides access to corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information on nearly 5,000 companies from 135 industries in 65 countries. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub tobenchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices and seek ways to change the world.

CSRHub rates 12 indicators of employee, environment, community and governance performance and flags many special issues. We offer subscribers immediate access to millions of detailed data points from our 140-plus data sources. Our data comes from six socially responsible investing firms, well-known indexes, publications, “best of” or “worst of” lists, NGOs, crowd sources and government agencies. By aggregating and normalizing the information from these sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links each rating point back to its source.