Norway fund wants more women on boards, concerned about excessive CEO
pay
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[August 18, 2023] By
Gwladys Fouche
ARENDAL, Norway (Reuters) - Norway's $1.4 trillion wealth fund, the
world's single largest stock market investor, is to step up pressure on
the companies it invests in to have more women board members and to also
reduce excessive executive pay, a top fund official said.
The fund is one of a growing number investors and policymakers pushing
to put more women in company boardrooms. Having a broader range of
experiences around a boardroom table has been shown to improve
decision-making and corporate culture.
The fund holds stakes in around 9,200 companies globally, equivalent to
1.5% of all listed stocks and has set the pace on many issues in the
field of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG).
Its latest move comes as the fund takes stock of its ESG engagement with
companies so far this year. On Wednesday, it published for the first
time an analysis of its voting record during this year's annual
shareholder meeting season, where investors vote on issues including
executive pay.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Aug/18/images/ads/current/brandt_sda_FAIR_2023.png)
Since 2021, the fund has campaigned to boost the number of women on
company boards and to consider targets if fewer than 30% of directors
are female.
"This year we said (to companies) that 'if you don't have even one woman
on the board, we will vote against you'. We will step that up next
year," Carine Smith Ihenacho, the fund's chief governance and compliance
officer, told Reuters in an interview.
She said specific details of how the fund will do this have not been
decided. One option could be to expand the fund's focus to more
countries - at the moment the fund concentrates on the United States,
Europe and Japan.
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![](../images/081823PIX/busine91.jpg)
The trading floor of Norges Bank
Investment Management, the Nordic countryÕs sovereign wealth fund in
Oslo, Norway, June 2, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins/File Photo
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Aug/18/images/ads/current/graue_quarter_FAIR_2023.png)
"So far, we haven't looked at developing markets," said Smith
Ihenacho. "We can (also) step it up in Japan, increase the (minimum)
threshold from one to two (women on a board)."
The fund has also put executive pay in the spotlight and now plans
to also step up the pressure, though details of how are not decided.
"We are concerned. The large packages are getting larger, and from
the figures we have seen, the larger packages are increasing more
than the median of packages, and more than inflation," said Smith
Ihenacho.
So far this year, the fund voted against 1 in every 10 CEO pay
packages, more than in recent years, and including against a growing
number in the United States, its report showed.
This year for the first time the fund analysed the structure of all
U.S. pay packages above $20 million to see if they aligned with
long-term value creation.
As a result of its analysis, the fund voted against more than half
of pay packages above this level, the report showed.
The fund voted against the pay of Coca-Cola's James Quincey, Apple's
Tim Cook and PepsiCo's Ramon Laguarta, the fund's voting record
showed.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche in Arendal; editing by Jane Merriman)
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