In today’s edition: the resurgence of J. Crew, why Shari Redstone sold Paramount, and the return of IPOs—with one problem.
– Back in action? IPOs are back—but women are missing.
My colleague Lila MacLellan dug into the reopening of the public markets in a new piece for Fortune. Sixty-one companies filed IPO-related documents during the first two weeks of August in the U.S. Eighty-eight percent had either one or zero women on their boards, and 93% had one or zero women in their C-suites.
Damion Rallis, cofounder of board data firm Free Float Analytics, first uncovered the data, which he called the “Bro-PO” market. “We’ve given up our ideals. We’ve just given up,” he said.
Amid the rollback of DEI—and even years earlier, the reversals of board gender quota laws in California and elsewhere—there was a prevailing, optimistic point of view. Companies had already met the 30% board diversity benchmarks, so the work had been done. Laws might have been overturned, Goldman Sachs might have reversed its pledge to only take public companies that met those standards, but we didn’t need them anymore.
