12.3.1 Descriptive statistics

The majority of the 417 respondents are male (332, 79.6 %) and the average age is 58.8. With respect to experience, men have a significant lead with 10.2 years in a position as supervisory director versus 8.1 years for women. The number of supervisory board positions (2.5 versus 2.0) and the number of chairman positions (0.9 versus 0.4) is also significantly higher for the male respondents. The details of age, experience and the number of supervisory and chairman positions are shown in Table 12-1.

Table 12-1: The characteristics age, experience (i.e. the number of years of experience as supervisory director), number of supervisory board seats and the number of chairman positions of the 417 respondents. ** Significant at 95% confidence level, *** 99%.

Besides their position on a supervisory board, 108 supervisory directors (25.9%) hold a position as executive director in another company. Whilst 258 (61.9%) of the respondents are appointed to more than one supervisory board, all the respondents together occupy in total 963 supervisory board positions in different types of organisations. A distribution of all the supervisory board positions over the different types of organisations is given in Panel A of Table 12-2. 57 (5.9%) seats in this category of 963 seats are held on the supervisory board of a listed company, 353 (36.7%) in non-listed companies and 163 (16.9%) positions on the supervisory board of family-owned companies. 141 (14.6%) and 104 (10.8%) positions are held by respondents on the supervisory boards of healthcare institutions and housing associations, respectively. The remaining 138 (15%) supervisory board positions are occupied in organisations that are not defined further, such as libraries, charity foundations and educational institutions.

Table 12-2: The distribution of the respondents’ supervisory board seats over the different organisations. Panel A shows the distribution over all supervisory board seats, Panel B shows the distribution of the supervisory board seats that respondents were asked to have in mind when completing the survey.

Table 12-2 also shows the breakdown into board positions occupied by male or female respondents. Without going into detail, it is remarkable that only two (1.2%) of 163 supervisory board positions in family-owned companies are occupied by women. This number is rather limited, because overall 157 (16.3%) of all 963 supervisory board positions are occupied by women. Table 12-2 shows in Panel B the distribution of the evaluated positions; respondents were asked to have their most relevant supervisory board position in mind when answering the questions in the survey.1 31 supervisory directors have a position in a listed company, which is of importance for this study. In total 196 supervisory board seats are occupied in profit organisations and 221 in non-profit organisations.