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Call for more women in British boardrooms

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Summary of story from BBC, 24.2.11.

UK businesses are expected to be told to almost double the number of women on boards by 2013 or face government measures.

Former minister Lord Davies of Abersoch will urge FTSE 350 companies to boost the number of women at the board table to 20 per cent by 2013 and 25 per cent by 2015.

As reported on WVoN, he’s expected to stop short of imposing quotas, unless the voluntary measures fail.

The Chartered Management Institute said the news would be welcomed by “nervous businesses”.

“The news that companies will not be forced to promote female workers to the boardroom by quota will be widely welcomed by nervous businesses,” said CMI chief executive Ruth Spellman.

“However, a concerted effort still needs to be made to use female talent, otherwise companies will be missing out on a vast array of talent at their disposal.”

Currently a total of 113 women hold 135 FTSE 100 positions – just over one per firm.

According to the most recent report from the Cranfield School of Management on female representation in the boardroom, women made up only 12.2 per cent of directors of the FTSE 100 companies in 2009.

FTSE 250 companies have an even lower proportion of female directors at 7.3 per cent, and nearly half of them don’t have any women in the boardroom.

But is positive discrimination the answer?  People should be chosen for a job on the basis of merit, not out of fear of government sanctions.  I don’t think any self respecting businesswoman would be happy to know that she got promoted so her boss could balance the gender books.

  1. I read something somewhere, possibly on this site. It was about female public speakers. Somebody found that if you ask people to suggest a public speaker, they will inevitably think of lots of men. If you ask somebody to suggest a female public speaker, they suddenly realise there are also lots of talented women available. So there is a case to be made for asking companies to think about women.

    I don’t think positive discrimination is a good idea. There’ll be a backlash against women.

    • I think we can all agree that people should be chosen for a job on the basis of merit. The question then is why so many incompetent people are running businesses all over the world. I ask this question based on the recent fiasco in the banking world. If competent people were running these businesses, surely they would not have ended up in the mess they did.

      That is, if competent people were running them. Which clearly they are not.

      So why not? Are people being picked for these jobs because they happen to know someone else, rather than for their ability to do the job. I wonder what we call this? Aha, yes, I know. It’s called positive discrimination, aka the old boy’s network.

      Can we therefore drop this rather tired argument about positive discrimination and merit. What we’re trying to do is to get some balance in the world which has been proven, time after time, to produce better results for the companies themselves.

      Companies with better gender equality make more money partly because they are not subject to group think. This stems from having a board and senior management who think the same way because they have such a similar outlook.

      We reviewed a book on this just recently on this very site – “Your loss – how to win back your female talent” which shows that companies are losing a fortune by losing female talent.

      So let’s stop worrying about so-called positive discrimination and start actively campaigning for some balance in the boardroom and at senior management levels.

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