Board Placements for Women Fell 33% in a Year, Executives Say

Board placements for women dropped 33% over the last year, according to Merline Saintil, cofounder of Black Women on Boards. She delivered the figure at Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women Summit, in a conversation with editorial director Diane Brady. Her explanation was blunt: companies screen for titles women rarely hold.

"Placements are happening, but they're happening specifically for CEOs," Saintil said. "We're back to CEO, CFO profile now. So if you're a technologist or someone outside of that, I would just say keep relationship building, keep networking."

The pullback is roughly one in three opportunities gone in twelve months. That is a sharp reversal for a pipeline many treated as a reliable second act for senior women.

Why are boards narrowing the profile?

Saintil was not alone on the panel. Executives from Heidrick & Struggles, TwinPoint Collective, and Logitech joined her in describing a recruitment market that has tightened around a narrow set of credentials.

Jane Bargmann, global managing partner of private equity, industrial and life sciences at Heidrick & Struggles, said a growing number of leaders are ditching day jobs to build full-time board careers. They join a slew of publicly traded and private-equity companies, brokering deals and serving on portfolio boards through what she called their "retirement."

"What we're seeing now is people make the decision to step out of a full-time role or an operating role earlier and build a portfolio of boards," Bargmann said. "Some retired individuals are just as busy as CEOs."

Busy is not the same as employable, however. The panel's sharpest warning came from Hanneke Faber, CEO of software manufacturer Logitech. She said boards are not recruiting members who have kicked their feet up. They want C-suite candidates who are in the know and able to keep pace with fast-moving change.

"This thought of, 'Let me step out of my day job and go do boards,' [is] not such a good idea at the moment. Because we want people who are current, who are dealing with some of these issues in their day job," Faber said. "Being current is a huge help for getting on a board today."

Takeaway: leaving the operating role early may close the very door a board career was meant to open.

Where is the opening for women?

Faber agreed with Bargmann that recruiters are hunting CEOs and CFOs first, but she said they are also drawing from the C-suite more broadly — territory where women have a genuine opening. The caveat is obvious: that opening only exists while the executive stays in the seat.

Annie Young-Scrivner, cofounder and CEO of private equity firm TwinPoint Collective, argued relationships do much of the work. In her final CEO stint, leading global beauty brand Wella Company, she worked with Heidrick & Struggles to completely reestablish her board. Because most of Wella's consumers were women, she requested the lineup be 100% female to better serve their interests.

When hunting for the right people, she said, it comes down to connections.

"It makes a huge difference…tapping into that network," Young-Scrivner said. "As we're searching, the networks really help. So conferences like this, as you widen your aperture and your scope of connectivity, [are] really important."

Takeaway: the network, not the résumé alone, decides who gets the call.

What should executives take from this?

The panel's message cuts against the conventional second-act playbook. Board seats can offer a new chapter for seasoned executives, but landing one increasingly depends on staying active in the C-suite and leveraging the right connections. For technologists and operators outside the CEO-CFO mold, Saintil's advice amounts to waiting and networking.

The unspoken risk: if placement rates for women keep falling while boards favor sitting executives, the already thin supply of women in those seats becomes a self-reinforcing constraint.