California just became the first state to require women on corporate boards
Today, women hold just 18 percent of positions on the boards of the 3,000 largest publicly traded corporations in the U.S. In 2017, 624 public companies had no women on their boards at all.

This week, California became the first state to require publicly held corporations headquartered in the state to include women on their boards.

On Sunday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed 79 bills into law, 19 of which were part of a package aimed at supporting women, children and working families. Among them was Senate Bill 826, which requires any publicly held corporation headquartered in California to have a "representative number of women on its board of directors." This would require hundreds of Californian companies to make changes to their current boards.

In a signing message, Brown wrote that "[t]here have been numerous objections to this bill and serious legal concerns have been raised" that might "prove fatal to its ultimate implementation." Still, he emphasized, "it's high time corporate boards include the people who constitute more than half of the 'persons' in America."