In a rare move to update its voting policies in the midst of proxy season, ISS issued this press release stating it will no longer consider a board’s gender, racial or ethnic diversity when making director election recommendations. This policy change applies to the US benchmark and specialty policies of ISS – and apply to shareholder meeting reports published on or after February 25th.
ISS guidance regarding independence, accountability and responsiveness for director elections remains the same.
This development comes pretty late in the game for most companies with December 31st fiscal year-ends as they wrap up finalizing the drafting of their proxies. But some companies may have already been tweaking their board diversity disclosure this season as two of the major institutional investors had already made similar policy changes when they announced changes to their own policies a few months ago.
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