About the data
To analyse the composition of boards around the world, the Financial Times used data provided by ISS Analytics, Powered by DataDesk, covering more than 45,000 directors across 5,000 companies in 30 markets.
The data is a part of Institutional Shareholder Services' QuickScore report, designed to help investors identify governance risk within portfolio companies.
The database includes companies in the US’s Russell 3000 and S&P 500, Canada’s S&P/TSX Composite, New Zealand’s NZX 15, Australia’s ASX 200 and Europe’s STOXX 600 in addition to local European market indices such as the UK FTSE All-Share. It also includes widely-held companies in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore, South Africa and South Korea. ISS defines “widely held” based on a company's membership in a major index and/or the number of ISS clients holding the company’s stock.
The data provided included each director’s name, age, tenure, gender, committee membership, independence classification, title and industry, among other fields. Ages and tenures were missing on about 4 per cent of entries and were primarily from directors in Greece, Australia, Germany and New Zealand.
The data is current to July 2016, however many ages are as of the company's last annual report.
An FT survey of the data showed about 80 per cent of the largest 200 global companies were included in the database. The vast majority of companies that were not included were Chinese.