University of Washington School of Law UW Law Digital Commons Articles Faculty Publications 2019 Innovating Inclusion: The Impact of Women on Private Company Boards Jennifer S. Fan University of Washington School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles Part of the Business Organizations Law Commons, and the Law and Gender Commons Recommended Citation Jennifer S. Fan, Innovating Inclusion: The Impact of Women on Private Company Boards, 46 FLA. ST. U. L. REV. 345 (2019), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/504 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at UW Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of UW Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. INNOVATING INCLUSION: THE IMPACT OF WOMEN ON PRIVATE COMPANY BOARDS JENNIFER S. FAN* ABSTRACT Eight percent—that is the percentage of women who serve on the boards of directors of private high technology companies. Private companies, particularly high technology compa- nies, have transformed citizens’ daily lives, while the unprecedented availability of private capital has allowed those companies to remain private longer. This rise, however, has also obscured some of the weaknesses of private companies, which are not subject to public disclo- sure and regulatory oversight: rampant sexual harassment, the lack of women leaders in tech- nology companies, the relative absence of female venture capitalists, and the dearth of female board members, to name a few. Yet thus far, legal scholarship on gender diversity on corporate boards has focused almost exclusively on public companies, overlooking the stark lack of women in the vastly wealthy and influential sector of private capital.