Investor relations executives or officers (IROs) are slowly starting to move on to public company boards and into the C-suite, according to Gary LaBranche, president and CEO of the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI).

During the last month, The Conference Board ESG Center released five pieces of research that cover corporate board practices among Russell 3000 and S&P 500 companies, business media perspectives on the director’s job description, the idea of extending ethical business principles to digitalization, how ESG raters miss rating governance and how standardized social outcomes can measure the impact of societal investments.

The latest research from the Governance Center covers the independent auditor and regulator perspectives on the director’s job description, and a theory about outsourcing public company board functions to a board service provider. We also released two more installments in our "Director Notes" series.

When it comes to gender diversity on public company boards, there is good news and bad news, according to LeaderXXchange. Among the world’s largest public companies gender leadership scores are climbing and most companies have formal diversity policies. However, there is a lot more that must be done.

The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, which handles no-action letters regarding shareholder proposals, is back in business for now as the federal government shutdown ended Jan. 25.

Fortune 500 board representation of women and minorities saw an all-time high of 34 percent, compared to 30.8 percent in 2016, according to the "Missing Pieces Report: The 2018 Board Diversity Census of Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards," a multiyear study published by the Alliance for Board Diversity (ABD), in collaboration with Deloitte.

Sophie L’Helias, a senior fellow with The Conference Board Governance Center and founder of the LeaderXXchange, was named to Global Proxy Watch’s “2018 GPW 10” list.

During the last three months, the Governance Center released four pieces of research that cover CEO and executive compensation practices, CEO succession practices, the Delaware bench and bar perspectives on the job description of a corporate director, and an analysis of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations.

While political control of Congress in 2019 is unknown two weeks before Election Day, what is known is the number of S&P 500 companies receiving high scores for political disclosure and accountability continues to increase. That is a major finding of the 2018 CPA-Zicklin Index.

Seven CEOs of companies that are members of The Conference Board Governance Center are among 20 who have signed on to the Commonsense Corporate Governance Principles 2.0, which has been endorsed by the Governance Center and the Business Roundtable and will be hosted by the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School.