Dear Chairwoman,

Book excerpt: DEDICATED TO THE NEXT GENERATION OF WOMEN BOARD LEADERSIn 2018, California passed a senate bill (SB 826) to require publicly held companies headquartered in CA to have at least one woman on their board by 2020. In 2020, Nasdaq proposed a mandate that would require listed companies to have at least two diverse board members with one member who identifies as female. Initiatives like these are helping advance gender parity on boards in many regions, not just the U.S. In late 2020, women held 22.6% of the board seats on the Russell 3000 for the first time, a 6.5 point jump over the past 4 years.Zooming out to the global scale, the picture is similarly improving. In 2020, about 23% of board seats globally were held by women, compared to 20% in 2018. Yet...at the time of this writing, 10% of large global companies do not have a single woman on their board. And the percent of women who chair boards is dramatically smaller. Among the largest 500 public U.S. companies by revenue the share of women who chaired boards remained stagnant at 7.4%. Notably, of those women who chair boards, few of them use the term Chairwoman in their bios or LinkedIn profiles-opting for monikers Chairman, or Board Chair, or occasionally Chairperson. This book features the extraordinary voices and stories of women leaders from around the world who have trailblazed to the board room, as letters to the next generation of women in business and government. With the salutation "Dear Chairwoman," these letters are infused with the energy to inspire young women to both pursue board governance early, and to claim the 'Chairwoman' title in taking the senior-most seat in the Board Room.