Women now hold one out of every five seats on corporate boards on the country's top companies Women hold one out of every five seats on corporate boards for the country's 3,000 largest publicly traded companies, according to new data cited in The Wall Street Journal . After the #MeToo movement, companies fired many powerful men in business for sexual harassment charges. Research suggests diverse teams perform better than homogeneous ones. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. America's largest companies are now powered by more women than ever before. Women hold 20% of seats on corporate boards for publicly traded companies, The Wall Street Journal reports. The figure represents a jump from 2016, when women held 15% of corporate board seats, The Journal found, citing data from data firm Equilar. Equilar analyzed corporate boards of companies on the Russell 3000 index, which measures the performance of the 3,0000 largest publicly traded companies measured in the US. Read more: There's a record number of women on the boards of Fortune 500 companies. Racial and ethnic minorities, not so much.