The directors of 884 public companies believe women have their place — and it’s limited to just 40 percent of America’s board seats.
Fifty-three percent of respondents in a recent survey believe in diversity but feel the optimal percentage of boards seats that should be held by women should be 40 percent, or less.
Shockingly, a full 10 percent of board directors answering the survey — 97 percent of whom were men — said that if a board wants to operate at its optimum, no more than 1 in 5 board members should be a woman.
The survey, taken by PricewaterhouseCoopers, is being released Tuesday.
The survey found that 96 percent of corporate boards agree diversity is a good thing — but more than 8 in 10 feel there are hurdles to getting there.
For example, companies often tap current and former chief executives to sit on boards, but only 4 percent of S&P 500 CEOs are female, and only 1 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are African-American, the PwC survey said.
Therefore, boards may have to look outside the C-suite for qualified candidates, it said.
Men and women also differed on how much having a diverse board helps company performance, with 89 percent of women saying it helps, but only 24 percent of men seeing it the same way.
The slowness in implementing diversity may be due to 87 percent of boards relying on existing board member recommendations to fill new seats.
Those recommendations tend to be candidates who already serve on other boards, suggesting a less diverse profile, Paula Loop of PwC told The Post.
Although women make up 20 percent of S&P 500 boards, their presence has only grown by 5 percentage points over the last decade.