The Risk Metrics is a comprehensive database on corporate takeover defense strategies and large array of corporate governance items. The Directors Data includes a range of variables related to individual board directors (e.g., name, age, tenure, gender, committee memberships, independence classification, primary employer and title, number of other public company boards serving on, shares owned, etc.). This data collection began in 1996 and is updated annually. The current universe is the S&P 1500 companies, which has continued since 1996, although in earlier years the data was captured for a few hundred additional large-cap companies as well