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WILLIAM BLAIR FUNDS proxy voting record, 2023-2024

WILLIAM BLAIR FUNDS reported 22,056 proxy votes on Form N-PX for the 2024 season. On the 16,074 ballot items the board itself put forward — directors, pay, the auditor, capital — it voted FOR 87.6% of the time. On the 190 environmental and social proposals put on the ballot by shareholders, it voted FOR 50.0% of the time.

2023-20242024-20252025-2026

On the board’s own proposals

87.6% FOR of 16,074 fund votes on board proposals in 2023-2024: directors, pay, auditor, capital.

FOR 14,084 AGAINST 1,280 Abstained or withheld 710

How we count these

On proposals shareholders put on the ballot

50.0% FOR of 190 fund votes on environmental and social proposals shareholders put on the ballot. The board opposed 178.

FOR 95 AGAINST 95 Abstained 0

See the 95 it backed →

How we count these

By proposal type

A single “voted with management” figure makes every manager look the same: director elections are most of the volume and nearly everyone votes FOR them. The record is therefore reported per category, using the category the filer itself put on each item in its N-PX.

WILLIAM BLAIR FUNDS, 2023-2024. “Decided” is FOR + AGAINST, the denominator of the two percentage columns; abstentions and withheld votes are shown separately and are never inside a percentage. Counted in ballot items — one fund’s vote on one proposal at one meeting — never in shares.
Proposal typePut on the ballot by ItemsDecided Voted FORVoted AGAINST Abstained / withheld
Director Elections Board (42 inferred) 9,333 8,615 92.7% 7.3% 683
Corporate Governance Board 4,817 4,764 91.6% 8.4% 53
Corporate Governance Shareholders 109 106 83.0% 17.0% 3
Compensation Board (20 inferred) 2,433 2,408 80.9% 19.1% 25
Compensation Shareholders 10 10 0.0% 100.0% 0
Capital Structure Board 2,396 2,396 95.2% 4.8% 0
Capital Structure Shareholders 4 4 100.0% 0.0% 0
Audit-related Board 1,285 1,285 99.5% 0.5% 0
Audit-related Shareholders 32 29 93.1% 6.9% 3
Say-on-Pay Board 688 588 92.0% 8.0% 2
Other Social Issues Board 81 81 100.0% 0.0% 0
Other Social Issues Shareholders 129 129 51.9% 48.1% 0
Extraordinary Transactions Board 209 209 74.6% 25.4% 0
Other Board 182 179 82.7% 17.3% 3
Other Shareholders 12 12 75.0% 25.0% 0
Environment or Climate Board 50 50 92.0% 8.0% 0
Environment or Climate Shareholders 81 81 38.3% 61.7% 0
Human Rights or Human Capital/workforce Board 38 38 100.0% 0.0% 0
Human Rights or Human Capital/workforce Shareholders 59 59 47.5% 52.5% 0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Board 38 38 100.0% 0.0% 0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Shareholders 57 57 21.1% 78.9% 0
Shareholder Rights and Defenses Board 51 32 100.0% 0.0% 19
Shareholder Rights and Defenses Shareholders 4 4 100.0% 0.0% 0

An item the filer put in two categories is counted in both rows, so the rows add up to more than the total. Who put an item on the ballot is decided item by item: the filer’s own answer on Form N-PX (Item 1(h)), or, where the filing does not give one, the proposal’s own wording (62 items, shown as inferred). The two figures above use only part of these rows: the board figure, board proposals on directors, pay, the auditor, capital, transactions and fund matters; the shareholder figure, environmental, social, workforce and diversity shareholder proposals at US-listed companies. How we count these

Every proposal where WILLIAM BLAIR FUNDS broke with the board (1,000 distinct proposals) →

What is being counted

The unit is a fund-level observation: one fund’s vote on one proposal at one meeting. It is not a share, not a filing line and not a proposal.
WILLIAM BLAIR FUNDS filed 22,056 vote records for 2023-2024; after removing votes filed twice in different N-PX filings, that is 20,974 ballot items (fund-level observations) across 818 issuer names and 18 funds. They cover 10,049 distinct proposals: one proposal voted by twenty of its funds is twenty ballot items here and one proposal. Proposals are counted per issuer name and meeting, and wordings of the same director nominee are counted once; two different wordings of any other proposal count twice, so this is an upper bound. A fund that reported several directions for the same item is a split vote, counted on its own (see the table below) and not collapsed into the larger direction. “Issuer names” is literal: filers spell the same company several ways and those are counted separately here, so this runs higher than the number of distinct companies.
Share counts are not used anywhere on this page.
Share figures in N-PX carry their own long list of corrections in this dataset, and a share-weighted rate would inherit every one of them. Every percentage here is a count of items.
Abstentions are reported, never hidden inside a percentage.
On the board’s own proposals an abstention or a withheld vote is not support, so it is in the denominator of the FOR figure and not in its numerator. On shareholder proposals an abstention is neither support nor opposition, so it is excluded from the denominator and shown on its own.
133 items are outside both headline figures.
Besides the table rows neither figure uses:
ExcludedItemsWhy
Not voted0 Reported as not voted, take no action or do not vote. No position was expressed, so there is nothing to count.
Other ballot type98 Frequency ballots (one / two / three years) and anything else that is not a FOR, AGAINST, abstention or withhold.
Direction indeterminate0 The fund reported several directions for one ballot item with no shares attached to any of them, so which way it voted cannot be established.
Split vote35 The fund voted its shares in more than one direction on the item (for example some FOR and some AGAINST), the smaller part at least 5% of its shares. It is not collapsed into the larger part.

About this page

Every figure is derived from Form N-PX, the filing in which registered funds disclose how they voted every proxy and institutional managers disclose their votes on executive pay (say-on-pay, say-on-frequency and golden parachutes). Figures are rebuilt weekly; this page was built on October 13, 2026. The interactive database shows the same votes company by company, including every individual fund.

WILLIAM BLAIR FUNDS proxy season coverage: 2023-2024 (this page) · 2024-2025 · 2025-2026.