Boards of directors of public companies are normally elected by shareholders. I wouldn't say they're chosen based on their real qualifications, more so their re

Boards of directors of public companies are normally elected by shareholders. I wouldn't say they're chosen based on their real qualifications, more so their reputation and popularity. The number of seats is kind of arbitrary from what I understand, you could add more or have less seats. Also what the board is responsible for is generally governed by government regulation in some jurisdiction. The whole thing is about corporate oversight to some extent, supposed to be you have unbiased members that don't have skin in the game like execs and CEOs and other employees and who can represent shareholder's interests as well as government regulation. I'm not sure how I personally feel about the law, but the idea that you'd need say a gender parity of board members isn't that insane as compared to say for hiring for a doctor, engineer, scientist, etc. If you think of the purpose of the board to be that unbiased oversight, you could argue diversity is a good way to optimize for reduced bias.