Do women need more help getting into the boardroom?
Two months ago Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that that country’s leading companies would be required to have at least 30 per cent women on their supervisory boards from 2016.
The measure is expected to impact 100 companies, and it was also determined that businesses failing to recruit enough women to non-executive boardroom posts would be barred from giving vacant seats to men.
Europe has pioneered this trend. France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium now have mandatory quotas ranging from 30 per cent to 40 per cent. Like Germany does now, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Austria, and Slovenia have voluntary quotas, and the European Union is considering legislation to mandate quotas.
The need for similar measures in places like the United States has also been increasingly discussed. One opponent of gender quotas, who has since become an advocate of the policy, is the International Monetary Fund’s managing director Christine Lagarde. Last year, she said: “I soon realised that unless we have targets, if not quotas, there was no way we were going to make the right decisions.”
Beyond the issue of quotas, there is a growing view that there is a need to hae a more even distribution of men and women in the boardroom, and hence a group of people who are able to give different perspectives on important issues, allowing them to make the best decisions.
Addressing the topic Corporate Equity: Women In The Boardroom in March last year while delivering a University of the West Indies Open Campus and Central Bank lecture at the Grande Salle, The Nation Publishing Company Limited’s Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Vivian-Anne Gittens said one important way more women could become directors of companies was through the support of other women who were already in the boardroom.
“Sometimes [women] are struggling to hold onto the little bit of power [they] have. . .and don’t realise there is a little bit that can be shared with somebody else. We are so conscious of what more we can grab and how [much] further we can go, that we forget that we can help persons coming along,” she said.
“Not only recommend them but commend them when they are already there. Have something good to say about what they are doing. . .and encourage businesses to support female talent.”
But while the lobby for more corporate female directors continues to increase, there are still stome who think the boardroom is the male’s domain.
Recently released research produced by international executive recruitment company Executives Online found that “a third of senior executives doubt the value of women in the boardroom”. The research concluded that “while 71 per cent of top executives believe gender diversity in the boardroom is always a good thing, nearly a third (29 per cent) of all senior executives doubt its value altogether”.
Executives Online managing director James O’Brien said: “These figures show that there are clearly still a significant number of senior executives who don’t support the theory that gender diversity in the boardroom is good for business. This comes at a time when gender diversity is a hotly debated issue and the number of females in top executive roles is still low, having dropped from 6.7 per cent to 5.8 per cent internationally.”