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Friday 11 November 2005, 6:00am EST NEW YORK, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Only 10.3 percent of board seats at the world's 50 largest banks are held by women and some of the biggest global banks have no female directors, according to a new study released on Friday. The percentage of women board members at major banks worldwide is generally in line with the numbers at other big global companies, according to the study. Women are better represented on U.S. bank boards than at global banks, although U.S. banks lag other large, American corporations as a whole in female board representation, the study found. The study was conducted by Corporate Women Directors International, a non-profit group that works to boost female participation on boards of directors. The group found that 70 percent of the 50 largest global banks have at least one female director. For the top 100 U.S. banks, women's representation was 90 percent. The data were based on board membership as of June 30. The top-ranked bank in terms of women board member representation was Nordea Bank AB (NDA.ST: Quote, Profile, Research) of Sweden, with four women on its 11-member board. One of the biggest banks, Swiss-based UBS AG (UBSN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research), has no women directors. A UBS spokeswoman in New York, Allison Chin-Leong, said the bank had no comment on the composition of its board. None of the six Japanese banks included in the 50 largest have any female board members, the survey found. At the top 100 U.S. banks, women hold about 12.2 percent of board seats, according to the study. In comparison, the average percentage of women directors in the Fortune 500 companies is 13.7 percent, the study said. The results of the new study are disappointing, although some banks are making big strides in adding more women and minorities to their boards, said Reatha Clark King, a board member at Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC.N: Quote, Profile, Research), which fared well in the study with five women directors on its 15-member board. "I thought we had made much more progress, because there is much greater attention for the need to diversify boards today," said King, who has been a member of Wells Fargo's board or that of its predecessor companies since 1978. "In some organizations there has been lots of progress, but it has been spotty." The increased earnings power of women has caught the attention of many banks, which have geared marketing campaigns and products specifically toward them, according to Irene Natividad, co-chair of Corporate Women Directors International.
But "sadly that commitment is not reflected in the boardroom of
many banks, as our study today demonstrates," she said in news release
accompanying the report.
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