Retail is changing. Mobile devices are glued to consumers’ hands, and brick-and-mortar stores are no longer separate from e-commerce operations — they’re one in the same. A company’s board must be able to keep up with these changes because directors are responsible for representing stockholders, managing policies and making decisions on critical issues.

Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership consulting firm, released its annual Retail and Apparel Board Index in March. The index looks at board practices of 112 of the nation’s top retail and apparel companies with revenues of at least $1 billion. The study helps companies compare their boards to those of the nation’s top retailers. Questions like “Do we have strong leadership? Are we attracting directors with a wide skill set? Is our board diverse enough?” can be answered by this survey.

A few key findings from this year’s report include the following:

  1. Retail and apparel boards are a bit smaller than S&P 500 boards — 9.6 directors compared to 10.8.
  2. On average, directors were paid $211,614 — 40 percent cash fees and 52 percent stock awards.
  3. Fifty-nine percent of companies split the roles of CEO and chair of the board.
  4. Boards are becoming slightly more diverse. Thirty-one percent of new, independent S&P 500 directors are women — an all-time high. Furthermore, retail boards are doing a bit better when it comes to have women representation. Women make up 37 percent of the retail industry’s new, independent directors.

The number of women directors is higher than last year, but does that mean women are making strides in the boardroom? Not really. The study finds that overall, women only make up 21 percent of all retail and apparel directors, and that number drops to 20 percent when you look at S&P 500 boards. There are even some company boards with no female representation at all.

In another study conducted by Spencer Stuart, male directors, especially older respondents, reported the “lack of qualified female candidates” is what’s keeping women out of boardrooms. However, the younger male directors — 55 and younger — believe that diversity isn’t a priority in board recruiting and traditional networks tend to be male-dominated. When executives — 85 percent male in Fortune 500 companies — use their networks to hire directors, it becomes hard to add the needed diversity to corporate boards.

2020 Women on Boards is a nonprofit organization devoted to bringing more women into corporate governance. Its goal is to raise the number of women on U.S. company boards to over 20 percent or greater by 2020.

The lack of women on boards isn’t just an issue in the U.S., however. A Deloitte Global study conducted last year revealed that just 12 percent of board seats worldwide are held by women. Getting more women into boardrooms across the country and world can help set the stage for effective corporate governance.