We presented our GBDD (Gender Board Diversity Database) at FEMETRICS Lab event at EUI in Florence. The FEMETRICS project aims to address gender data gaps by assessing official statistics providers, highlighting the non-economic aspect of gender-data availability, capturing the broader wellbeing of women and girls, and analyzing policy and legal frameworks.

Our paper does not work with th existing official statistics. Rather, we generate new statistics. We harmonized (literally!) millions of information records on private firms in Europe spanning 44 countries and four decades. We deliver old and new measures of gender board diversity which cover the previously ignored private firms, which constitute the majority of firms, give majority of jobs and offer a vast majority of board positions. Yet, these firms remain typically outside the scope of our -- societal -- interest and beyond the scope of legal initiatives addressing diversity. Our most stunning funding is that roughly 60+% of firms report no single woman in any board. The amazing part of the FEMETRICS event was the great interest in the audience on specific countries and industries which excel in having strictly zero gender diversity. We share the data here and we hope that the data can be used by scientists from across the disciplines and by policy makers. 

We are very grateful to Gaby Umbach, Bogna Kietlinska, Mira Manini Tiwari for the invitation to participate and to Agata Andrysiak for a very valuable discussion.