Last week, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon announced that beginning in July, the investment bank will no longer help companies go public unless they have at least one “diverse” board member, putting a special focus on women.
According to research from Crunchbase and the Harvard Business Review, among “200 of the most heavily funded US-based, private, venture-backed companies”:
In the last 2 years, more than 60 companies in the US went public without a woman or person of color on their board.
Goldman isn’t the first institution to call out the lack of diversity on corporate boards:
But since Goldman is the single largest IPO underwriter in the country, the buck often stops with them — and that means this new policy could have a huge impact.