N.J. corporations had more women board members in 2009, report says

That’s up from 16.8 percent of board members in 2008, the institute said. The percentage of women on corporate boards had remained at around 16 percent for the past four years, after rising from 11 percent in 2005, according to the Executive Women of New Jersey.

“There is more consciousness and awareness out there of not only need, in terms of getting the talent on those boards, but also that women bring something special and different,” said Mary Hartman, the institute’s director. “There is correlation between the percentage of women on boards and the success of companies.”

The percentage of women on the boards of New Jersey’s Fortune 500 companies ranged from a low of 7.6 percent, at Princeton-based NRG Energy Inc., to a high of 44.4 percent, at Montvale’s Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea, according to the Institute for Women’s Leadership, which will be releasing a full report on their findings in the winter.

Most of the companies in the report increased the percentage of women on their boards, such as Johnson & Johnson, which increased from 27.27 percent in 2008 to 40 percent in 2009; Prudential Financial, which rose from 14.29 percent in 2008 to 33.33 percent in 2009; and Hertz Global Holdings, which went from 0 percent in 2008 to 21.42 percent this year, according to the institute.

But Hartman, who also is president of the Executive Women of New Jersey, said these increases represent “pretty slow progress, and a lot of people would still like to see [that] number larger than it is.”

The challenge of putting women on corporate boards is those boards are looking for women in high-level positions, said Angela Foster, a patent attorney and the chair of board appointment committee at the Executive Women of New Jersey, which will release its own study on women on corporate boards and in leadership positions in New Jersey’s top 100 corporations this spring. “But if the women aren’t there, then they can’t pick them.”

To ascend to corporate leadership positions, women need to better sell themselves in terms of their abilities and accomplishments, and make themselves known in their industries, Foster said: “When it comes to corporate boards, you have to be well-known.”

E-mail Evelyn Lee at elee@njbiz.com