Women on Boards – Progress Report

Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard wrote a slightly tongue in cheek article about why men of a certain age build up a portfolio of Non Executive Director roles, thereby limiting such opportunities for women amongst others:

“it was only this week that I heard the perfect description of what such a model portfolio [of Directorships] would entail for a recently retired male chief executive in his late fifties or early sixties.

The first directorship has to provide him with an office, so he can get out of the house and no longer be under the feet of a wife who – having seen him only at weekends for the past 30 years – finds his retirement even more disruptive than he does.

Second, he would need one company to provide him with a personal assistant, because most chief executives forget how to run their own diary.

Third, he would need a directorship which provided him with a car and chauffeur so he can attend the arduous round of dinners and get home without being breathalysed (and still less have to cope with Tube, taxis in the rain and mainline railway stations after 11pm).

Fourth, he would need a company which believed in sponsorship so he could still get the invitations to Twickenham, Lord’s, Wimbledon and the Royal Opera House.

Friday he would take off – he is retired after all – and go to Waitrose.”

The serious point that he is making is that although there has been some progress in increasing the number of women Directors “the real cultural battle has yet to be fought.”

The 6 month Monitoring Report on progress on implementing the Women On Boards has been published recently and highlights from it include:

• The percentage of FTSE 100 board seats held by women is now 14.2% (up from 12.5%).Since the Davies Report was published there have been 21 new female appointments
• These new 21 female appointments represent 22.5% of all appointments since March 1st 2011 to FTSE 100 boards. This is some way short of the 33% recommended in the Davies Report.
• On FTSE 250 boards there have been 28 new female appointments since March 1st 2011, representing 18% of all new appointments. 8.9% of all board seats on FTSE 250 boards are now held by women; up from 7.8% in late 2010. For the first time it is now the minority of FTSE 250 companies that have all-male boards.
• 33 FTSE 100 companies have set targets for the percentage of women they aim to have on their boards. Of these 33, only ten set themselves targets of greater than 10 percentage point increases.
• Sixty-one FTSE 100 companies made statements that acknowledge gender diversity issues in relation to the current debate about corporate boards. There were 55 statements from FTSE 250 companies. Around one third of these statements reinforced the message about selection being strictly on merit.

Theresa May and Vince Cable note in their introduction to the Report that:

There is still a long way to go and too many companies fail to recognise the potential of women in leadership positions. We remain optimistic, however, that the voluntary approach advocated by Lord Davies will deliver the necessary changes.

Government must also play its part. That’s why we are taking wider action to support women in the workplace, for example by extending flexible working. These policies, amongst others, will help to shift attitudes and behaviour away from the traditional nine-to-five model of work that can act as a barrier to many women and that no longer makes sense for many modern businesses.

As a final point the FT ‘Women at the Top’ blog reports on a beneficial side effect of increasing female representation on boards:

Want to retain more female employees? Appoint more women to the top.

So says Katherine Milkman, assistant professor of operations and information management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School:

“If women don’t look up from the lower rungs of the ladder and see people who resemble them, they are more likely to leave and either go to a competing firm or abandon the industry entirely. So to the extent that companies want to retain the best talent, it is really important to have more women at the top. It signals to talented younger women considering whether to stay or go that there is a place for them.”

Published by the One and All Foundation