Stockholm (NordSIP) – Despite the recent political pushback against Diversity, Equity and inclusion (DEI), there is a very good business argument to be made in favour of broad representation in companies’ boards and management teams. Evidence from McKinsey, the World Economic Forum and Harvard Business School supports the view that well-thought out diversity initiatives, such as mentoring programs, tend to improve financial performance.
Given these insights, AP2’s Female Representation Index 2025 report, which shows that the proportion of women on the boards of Swedish listed companies has reached a new all-time high, provides a hopeful prospect not just for equity but also for the Swedish economy.
“We see a positive trend with better gender equality in boardrooms, which can probably be partly explained by the EU directive on more equal gender distribution coming into force next year,” says Eva Halvarsson, CEO of AP2. “The development is also going in the right direction in the management teams, although at a slower pace.”
In this year’s survey, the proportion of female board members has increased to 36.5%, up from 35.5% last year and the highest level since the surveys began in 2003. In large-cap companies, women represent over 40% of the board for the first time. Of all companies in the survey, 46% reach the level of 40% female board members, a significant increase from 2024, when 41% of the companies had gender-balanced boards according to this definition.
Nomination Committees, Boards and Management Teams
This year is the third time that AP2 has compiled the Female Index internally, based on data from 361 primary and secondary listed companies on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm.
Echoing previous years’ results, the survey shows that companies with nomination committees have a higher proportion of women on the board than companies without nomination committees. Companies with nomination committees that have female representation have a full 9 percentage points higher proportion of women on the board than companies without nomination committees (40% and 31% women on the board, respectively).
The number of female chairpersons has increased slightly to 34 (32), which corresponds to 9 per cent of the 361 companies surveyed. The number of women CEOs is decreasing, to 40 (42) and the proportion of companies with female CEOs is thus 11.1 (11.8) per cent. The development has stagnated since 2021, both in terms of female CEOs and female chairpersons.
The proportion of women in the management teams of listed companies has also increased slightly in this year’s survey and now amounts to 29.2 (28.8) per cent, which is also the highest level so far since the surveys began.
“Nomination committees have an important job in promoting the development towards gender-equal boards. We can conclude that there is a clear connection – companies with at least one woman on the nomination committee are more successful in appointing gender-equal boards,” says Eva Halvarsson.
Still Some Way to Go
Despite this encouraging progress, AP2 notes that there are still 14 companies that completely lack women on their boards and 53 companies without women in their management teams.
On top of that, over half of the nomination committees lack female representation.
