Hartford Business Journal

30 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | March 28, 2022 FOCUS: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Equal Access Here's why more CT companies are committing to gender parity in leadership ranks By Robert Storace rstorace@hartfordbusiness.com W hile statistics show the number of women in top business leadership roles is improving, all sides agree more needs to be done to achieve gender equity in Connecticut and across the country. According to the Russell 3000 — a market index that measures the performance of the top 3,000 U.S. publicly-traded companies — 46.9% of companies had at least three women on their board of directors in 2021, a 21.7% increase from two years prior. The percentage of companies with greater than 30% of women on their boards also jumped 16.8% during that same period. Meantime, according to a September 2020 Hartford Business Journal analysis of C-suites at the 31-largest publicly traded companies in Connecticut, women held about 21% of senior leadership roles and 25.9% of board seats. Minorities, both women and men, had even less representation in leadership positions. Amid that backdrop, and with mounting pressure to diversify their workforces in the wake of the #MeToo movement and murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an increasing number of Connecticut companies are joining a national pledge to ensure that women hold 50% of senior leadership positions by 2030. The so-called Paradigm for Parity pledge was launched in 2016 by a coalition of U.S. business executives, board members and academics, and it has slowly built up its membership ranks across various industries. Eighteen Connecticut companies have now signed the pledge, with nearly half of the local signatories — including Hartford HealthCare (HHC), Trinity Health of New England and Jackson Laboratory — joining in the last year or so. Some Connecticut companies that recently signed on say they have already reached, or are close to reaching the 50% goal, and they joined the effort to be part of the gender equity conversation moving forward. "I think if you are not engaged with others and are operating in a vacuum, then you are not really able to support gender parity priorities that are important," said LuAnn Ballesteros, the vice president of external and government affairs at Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research nonprofit that has a major facility in Farmington. "We like to share our successes and learn from others who have had success in this area. We also want to engage with others who are seeking to improve." Gender parity efforts aren't simply being made for moral or public relations purposes. It can also be a good financial move, according to a report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, which found that companies with a higher percentage of women in decision-making roles generate better market returns and superior profits. Defining leaders Many of the Connecticut companies taking the Paradigm for Parity pledge have different ways to measure leadership posts. At Jackson Laboratory — where 49% of the company's approximate 3,000 employees are women — seven of the top 15 senior leaders (or 47%) are female, company officials said. HHC and Trinity Health both have workforces that are predominantly female. Seventy-eight percent of their respective employee bases — HHC employs 27,947 people, while Trinity Health has 10,237 workers — are women, they said. At HHC, anyone with a vice president title or higher is considered HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER LuAnn Ballesteros is the vice president of external and government affairs at Jackson Laboratory, which recently signed a pledge to have 50% of its leadership positions held by women by 2030.

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