Diligent’s Modern Leadership Initiative Adds New Partners to Provide Greater Visibility to Women Who Are Board-Ready

Global network of 45 partners driving diversity within boards and executive teams

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Diligent Corporation, the global leader in SaaS governance, risk and compliance, today announced the addition of four new women’s leadership partners – Catalyst, The Fourth Floor, Kellogg School of Management Center for Executive Women, and Women2Boards – in its growing Modern Leadership initiative which was created to further increase diverse representation at the executive and board levels for global businesses.

The expansion of the Modern Leadership initiative comes at a time of increased scrutiny in the U.S. and across the globe around the lack of diversity and inclusion of underrepresented communities within the highest levels of leadership. Overall, only 23.3 percent of board positions are held by women globally, according to research by Modern Leadership partner Egon Zehnder. Additionally, the Alliance for Board Diversity reports minority women make up 5.8 percent of Fortune 500 board seats. Modern Leadership seeks to improve those statistics for companies that are actively seeking to measure and report on diversity as a part of their environmental, social and governance strategy.

“Catalyst has long championed women in the workplace, but the pace of change at the highest levels of organizations remains slow. This is especially true for women of color, who will represent the majority of women in the U.S. by 2060 but still have a small percentage of representation in corporate boardrooms,” said Lorraine Hariton, President & CEO of Catalyst. “We are excited to work closely with Diligent to continue to challenge boards on diversity and inclusion.”

The initiative, launched in June of 2020, was established to provide senior leaders with the resources, partnerships, and technology needed to build more diverse and inclusive boards and executive teams. Modern Leadership now has 45 global partners, which are collectively contributing to Diligent Director Network — the largest and most diverse community of highly-qualified, board-ready directors and executives globally, accompanied by an expansive list of open board opportunities. Modern Leadership partners include membership organizations with diverse, board-ready talent, as well as private equity, venture capital, search firms and non-profits that are influential in the board placement process.

“Diligent works with more than 700,000 directors and executives around the world, and we are committed to leveraging our scale to make a positive impact alongside our partners,” said Brian Stafford, CEO of Diligent. “As more and more companies, including Diligent, look to align diversity, environment, social and governance metrics to overall company performance, our Modern Leadership initiative helps achieve these important goals.”

In addition to helping create leadership opportunities and make connections to rising directors, Diligent is committed to participating in an active dialogue about board diversity. The company will host a virtual discussion on May 6 at 11:00 AM EDT with the NYSE Board Advisory Council and Catalyst. The panel discussion, titled ‘Board Diversity: Rethinking Corporate Policies,’ will feature David Taylor, CEO of Procter & Gamble, Stacey Cunningham, President of NYSE Group, and Catalyst’s Hariton.

Diligent is committed to enacting change at the board level by helping executives connect with more diverse candidates to fill leadership opportunities. To learn more about Diligent’s Modern Leadership initiative, please visit https://diligentmodernleadership.com.

About Diligent Corporation

Diligent is the largest governance, risk and compliance (GRC) SaaS provider, serving more than one million users from over 23,000 organizations around the globe. Our modern GRC platform ensures boards, executives and other leaders have a holistic, integrated view of audit, risk, information security, ethics and compliance across the organization.

Diligent brings technology, insights and confidence to leaders so they can build more effective, equitable and successful organizations. We empower 62% of the Fortune 500, 90% of the FTSE 100 and 83% of the ASX 200 to improve their bottom line, keep pace with stakeholder expectations and create lasting, positive impact on the world.

For more information visit www.diligent.com.