Only two women have acceded to the Ibex's advice in the last year

Only two women have acceded to the Ibex's advice in the last year

With the future incorporation of Cristina Garmendia to CaixaBank and Sara de la Rica to Iberdrola, the female presence has stagnated at 24% and there are still 27 positions to occupy to achieve the goal of 30% by 2020

  Between January 1 and December 31, 2018, the board of directors of the 35 companies that make up the Ibex did not include any women. In a year in which the women's debate has been asserted above all after the success of the strike of March 8 and the social movement 'MeToo', the executive management bodies of the large Spanish corporations, their presence has remained paralyzed in the registers of 2017. Today, there are only two new counselors in these companies: Sara de la Rica, in Iberdrola, and Cristina Garmendia, in CaixaBank. His final appointment, proposed in two relevant facts before the CNMV, still depends on the approval that the meetings will foreseeably give of shareholders of both firms, which will take place on April 5 and March 29, respectively.

  The slowdown in the advancement of the incorporation of women to the Ibex-35 councils has been very striking in the last year. The selective has ceased to be the locomotive of parity, as it had been previously. Because only two women have joined the councils, up to 108 , out of a total of 455 profiles. The annual increase has not even reached 2% (it has remained at a minimum of 1.9%), compared with advances of more than 15% in 2017.

With these figures, the weight of women in the large Spanish company has stagnated in 23.7% of the total, practically the same percentage as 23.6% of the previous year. In the last year, only two profiles have been incorporated into the councils and it would take 27 more women to reach at least the 30% quota recommended by the CNMV at the end of 2020.

Although all the boards of the selective have at least one woman, three companies have reduced their counselors, as has happened in Siemens Gamesa (two less), Aena (one) and Acerinox (one). On the opposite side, there are cases such as Cellenex, which has gone from being the 'red lantern' (the only one without female directors in 2016) to one of the leaders in parity (four councilors, after incorporating three in a single year) .

The companies with the largest number of women on their boards are, with five posts, CaixaBAnk, Iberdrola, Red Eléctrica and Banco Santander; and with four, BBVA, Cellnex, Grifols, IAG, Mapfre, Mediaset, Merlin Properties and Siemens Gamesa. If these data are compared with the group of members of their councils, REE would be the most equal (with a 41.7% female presence), followed by Iberdrola and Santander (35.7%, respectively) . In fact, there are already 11 Ibex companies that comply with the objective set by the regulator.

In any case, the feminine impulse in these executive bodies where companies make their big strategic decisions has been relevant in the last decade. A period in which women have doubled their presence from just 53 who occupied an armchair in those listed in 2010, according to the latest report of IESE and Atrevia. This analysis also reveals that the low incorporation of women in 2018 occurs when all Ibex-35 companies have increased the number of directors by seven, of which five have been filled by men.

The statistics are still far from the objectives set by the CNVM so that listed companies reach a quota of at least 30% of women on their boards of directors. This is what the Good Governance code of the supervisor, whose president, Sebastián Albella, believes is "very difficult" to achieve that level. "We have tried to be quite active in this area, but the level of compliance with the objective is very scattered," he criticized last Monday.

For Nuria Chinchilla, professor at IESE, "it is feasible to reach 30% if we maintain the previous rhythm of incorporations". It would be necessary to occupy 27 women in the coming months before December 31, 2020, the deadline estimated by the CNMV to achieve it. In the case of all listed companies (those of the Continuous Market) it would take almost 100 more women.