Nearly a fifth of Egyptian board members are women: The proportion of women on Egyptian company boards rose three percentage points on the year before to 19.7% in 2022, according to the Egypt Women on Boards (WoB) Observatory’s annual monitoring report (pdf). More than 1.3k women sat on Egyptian boards last year — 26.6% more than in 2021.

Methodology: The report collects data on the boards of nearly 1k companies, including 676 non-banking financial service (NBFS) firms, 236 EGX-listed companies, 82 public sector enterprises, and 34 banks.

There’s still a long way to go — but improvement has been marked in recent years. The proportion of women on boards has almost doubled since 2019, when only 10% of board members were female. That marks an average annual growth rate of 32.1% over the last four years. If that growth is sustained, the country could reach the WoB Observatory’s target of having 30% of board seats filled by women by 2026 — ahead of its 2030 goal.

Leading the pack are NBFS firms, where women hold some 22% of overall board seats. More than a quarter of NBFS firms have already reached the 30% target. In second place are EGX-listed firms, where women account for more than 17% of board members and just over 10% of firms have met the target. The banking sector came in third: 16.5% of board members are women and nearly 12% of banks have met the 30% goal.

The public sector is a distant fourth place: Just over 9% of board seats at public-sector companies are held by women and less than 4% have met the target.

Regulations to boost female representation seem to be working: Under rules brought in by the Financial Regulatory Authority in 2021, women must account for at least 25% or two seats on the boards of EGX-listed firms and NBFS companies, while the central bank in the same year said banks must have at least two women on their boards. The increase in women on boards between 2021 and 2022 could be a result of “effective compliance with regulators’ decrees and decisions,” says the report, though it notes that “some companies and banks believe in diversity” and had already brought on at least two women to their boards before the decisions came into effect.

But all-male boards are still a thing: The number of companies who continue to have zero female representation on their boards is shrinking across all four categories, but all-male boards haven’t yet been consigned to history. Nearly 48% of public-sector enterprises have no female representation, though that figure is down from 72.5% in 2019. The figure stands at 15.1% among NBFS firms (down from 58.8%), 10.2% among EGX-listed firms (down from 53.3%), and 8.8% among banks (down from 26.5%).

There’s been little improvement in the number of women heading up big firms — and even a decline in some sectors. Only 16 of the 236 EGX-listed firms were chaired by women in 2022 — an increase of just one on the year before. Three of the 34 banks surveyed were chaired by women, down from five a year before. The public sector showed some improvement, with the number of chairwomen doubling to six out of 82 in 2022. Of the 676 NBFS firms, those with women at the helm dropped by almost half from 28 to 16 — even as the number of companies in the sector grew more than 5%.

Qualified women are out there — and the Observatory has already done the legwork to find them. The WoB Observatory “remains committed to supporting companies and banks in finding qualified women to serve on their boards through the AUC Egyptian Board Ready Women database,” Ghada Howeidy, associate dean at the AUC School of Business and the observatory’s founder, told Enterprise. Supported by UN Women Egypt, the database includes over 1k qualified women across 26 economic sectors, she said. The Observatory matches women in its database to organizations looking for board members at no cost. Women interested in joining the database can apply here.

Tags: