©2016 Bloomberg News
O3JMV46KLVRI

(Bloomberg) — There are almost 2,150 seats on the boards of the world’s biggest utilities. And less than a fifth are filled by women, Ernst & Young LLP said in a report today.

Of those female board members around the globe, 25 are also executives, according to Ernst & Young’s annual Woman in Power and Utilities Index. The number of women sitting on the boards of the biggest 200 utilities by revenue has risen by 1 percent over the past three years, the group’s survey shows.

Despite accounting for almost half of U.S. college graduates, women remain largely underrepresented in leadership and board roles across industries. They make up 4.4 percent of the chief executive officers at companies listed in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index and hold about 20 percent of board seats.

“At the current rate of progress, it will take 72 years to reach 40 percent women on boards in the power and utilities sector,” said Alison Kay, global industry vice chair at Ernst & Young. “That’s too long.” Research by the group showed that the most gender-diverse utilities outperformed the least gender- diverse ones by 14.8 percent on return on equity, Kay said.

–With assistance from Jeff Green and Carol Hymowitz.

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Chediak in San Francisco at mchediak@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bl