A work in progress
The number of women on corporate boards of directors is increasing, but slowly
Kristina Johnson loves a challenge, and she loves serving on the board of directors of Boston Scientific Corp.
Johnson is no slouch in the brainpower department. Dean of Duke University's engineering school, serial entrepreneur, and holder of 45 patents for devices including one that can spot the two cancerous cells in a sample of 100,000, Johnson arrived at the Natick medical equipment maker's board last year through its acquisition of Guidant Corp., where Johnson was a director.
She describes her Boston Scientific colleagues as "outstanding. Smart, savvy, thoughtful, invigorating, a really challenging group of people." When she sits at the table with people like former US senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, Princeton University political economist Uwe Reinhardt, and Xerox Corp. business group president Ursula M. Burns, Johnson says, "You've got to come with your A game."
In addition to the complexity of leading an $8 billion medical device company, Johnson represents a small, slowly growing minority -- the 10.8 percent of directors at Massachusetts' 100 largest public companies who are women. "The most important thing about boards is that they represent shareholders and are effective," Johnson says, but for women like her to have entered the once-overwhelmingly male bastion of the boardroom "sends a message to the whole organization that women are valued. That is huge."
To advocates campaigning for more woman power on Massachusetts corporate boards, Boston Scientific is a hero company. Last year, it doubled the number of women on its board to four, with Johnson and New York private-equity executive Nancy-Ann DeParle joining Burns and Marye Ann Fox, chancellor and chemistry professor at the University of California at San Diego.
That move gave Boston Scientific the best female board representation among Massachusetts companies on the Fortune 500, according to an annual Census of Women Directors released in November by The Boston Club, an association of female business executives, in conjunction with Bentley University and Mercer Human Resource Consulting. In December, State Street Corp. added two women to its board, bringing its total to five.
Other leaders around the Bay State: Tewksbury video-editing supplier Avid Technology Inc., which has a majority-female board; Watertown corporate day-care operator Bright Horizons Family Solutions Inc., five of whose 12 directors are women; and Boston mutual fund manager Eaton Vance Corp., which last year went from no women on its board to 25 percent female representation when it elected as directors Harvard University vice president Ann E. Berman and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute executive vice president Dorothy Puhy.
Despite success stories, gender integration on corporate boards remains frustratingly slow, says Boston Club president Charlotte C. Hart , a former software company chief operating officer. In four years, the percentage of board seats at big Bay State companies held by women has gone up just 1.8 percent. More than two of every five companies on the Massachusetts top 100 still have all-male boards.
Fox, a polymer chemist who serves on three boards in addition to Boston Scientific -- none with more than one other female colleague -- says: "Women do tend to be team players, and they inject an element of bringing decision-making together.
"When you are receptive and listen well to all the technical competence and points of view you have at BSX, it means the quality of answers you get, the business decisions that are made, are that much better."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com. 
