Women on corporate boards seems like a good idea on the face of it.  Many countries have passed legislation establishing corporate board diversity ratios. Yet Nell Minow, an expert on corporate governance, is not surprised that boards which are weighted with women vote for what may be inapprorpriately high executive salaries.

In the New York Times, she says, “It’s very difficult for women to get on boards, and I think they are under even more pressure to go along and get along,  The culture of the boardroom is to vote yes. You want to stay on the board, don’t you?”

Today, roughly one in five directors at a wide array of public companies is female.  That’s up 31 percent over the last five years.

Macy’s, the giant retailer, ranked atop this list with six female directors out of 13. Wells Fargo came second with 40 percent of its board consisting of women. Procter & Gamble and Hewlett-Packard each had boards made up of 38.5 percent women.

At Abbott Laboratories and Cardinal Health, women directors accounted for 36.4 percent of the boards. At the remaining companies — Accenture, AT&T, ManpowerGroup and Tenet Healthcare — one-third of the board members were women.

At the 10 large United States company boards with the greatest gender diversity, 46 of the 124 directors were women. That’s more than a third.

An analysis of C.E.O. pay at 100 large companies last year by Equilar, a compensation research firm in Redwood City, Calif., found that companies with greater gender diversity on their boards paid their chief executives about 15 percent more than the compensation dispensed by companies with less diverse boards. In dollars, this translated to approximately $2 million more in median pay last year among these companies.