Women CEOs down to 12.5% in Singapore in 2023: MSCI report

FEWER women are leading Singapore’s large and mid-cap companies as chief executive officers, with the figure dipping 1.1 percentage points to 12.5 per cent. This bucks the trend in Asia-Pacific (Apac), where a 0.9 percentage point improvement was recorded.

The strongest improvements among the Apac markets were seen in New Zealand and Australia, where female representation at the CEO level grew 9.6 percentage points to 42.9 per cent, and 7.5 percentage points to 16.1 per cent, respectively.

Even in mainland China and Hong Kong, where female CEOs were rarer to begin with, the figure edged up 0.4 percentage point to 6.7 per cent, and 0.1 percentage point to 4.4 per cent respectively. 

These were the findings of investment research firm MSCI’s latest Women on Boards progress report, an annual publication that has been tracking the board gender diversity of the companies on the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) since 2009. 

Wang Xiaoshu, MSCI’s head of Apac ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) and climate research, said the improvement in Apac was fuelled in part by the regulatory measures introduced in markets aimed at promoting diversity practices. 

That said, Wang said it is worth noting that in recent years, regulators and investors have broadened their focus beyond gender diversity on corporate boards. 

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Increasingly, they have also been assessing a company’s performance in other metrics – the gender pay gap, female representation in other senior leadership roles, as well as the transparency of associated policies, targets and progress, she added.

Despite the disproportionate CEO gender ratio globally – 165 female CEOs to 2,255 male CEOs – this year’s report ascertained that base salaries and stock awards were more or less aligned between the genders. 

The average total pay in 2022 was US$6.3 million for women and US$6.5 million for men, the study found. This suggested pay equity at the CEO level, the report noted.

The sector with the most significant pay disparity was communications, where male CEOs earned an average total pay of US$9.9 million more than their female counterparts. 

The report also found that female representation on Singapore companies’ boards strengthened, with one in four board seats being filled by women last year, up from one in five in 2022. This was in line with the regional trend. In Apac, women held 18.2 per cent of board seats in 2023, up from 16.6 per cent in 2022.

However, the global average was still higher than that for both Singapore and Apac, with women holding 25.8 per cent of board seats across the MSCI ACWI index. The average for developed markets was 32.9 per cent, and that for emerging markets, 17.1 per cent.

Other Singapore improvements included a drop in the prevalence of all-male boards, and an uptick in the prevalence of female chief financial officers; 8.3 per cent of companies featured all-male boards in 2023, down slightly from 9.1 per cent in 2022. Female CFOs featured in 41.7 per cent of companies in 2023, up from 31.8 per cent the year before.