On International Women’s Day, Australia’s peak shareholders’ body said women should be appointed to company boards according to their abilities, not arbitrary quotas, according to The Australian newspaper. And Federal Opposition Women’s Affairs spokesperson Michaelia Cash restated the Coalition’s opposition to gender quotas, in response to Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey’s call for women to occupy a mandated 30 per cent of boardroom positions.
Meanwhile, Governor-General Quentin Bryce used International Women’s Day to call for board quotas, saying they are needed to break the “old boys” stranglehold over Australian business, and Australian Minister for the Status of Women Kate Ellis has stated that quotas were a last resort but that the government was leaving this option on the table.
But are we targeting the real problem in our discussions about quotas and getting more women onto Australian boards? I don’t think so.
I see the lack of women on boards as just a symptom of a much deeper problem that seems to have had disappointingly little media attention paid to it.
The real issue – the problem that must be addressed before any sustainable progress can be made toward gender equity in corporate Australia – is Australia’s prevailing organisational culture that keeps women off boards, by restricting their access to the C-suite executive roles that are feeder positions to corporate directorships.
I recently undertook a piece of research relating to factors that affect women’s representation on boards in Australia. I only used significant Australian and international studies that were up to two years old, so my sources were somewhat limited, but even so they identified no less than sixteen separate and evidence-based factors that currently block women’s ascendency to the board table.
Just a few of these factors were:
- the culture of mateship that continues to pervade Australian boards
- a lack of transparency in board appointment processes, and a failure to articulate and assess applicants against clear selection criteria
- the fact that boards usually recruit from restricted pools of applicants that are already known to, or referred by, their members
- board members’ tendency to “appoint in their own image”
- the fact that significantly fewer males than females see gender diversity on boards as a strategic corporate priority
- organisational expectations of a straight-line, always-available, geographically mobile career model
- the fact that board feeder positions – senior corporate C-suite roles with line management responsibilities – are predominantly filled by men
- the lack of support for women who wish to continue to build their careers after having a child, or taking on caring responsibilities, for example personally tailored return to work programs, telecommuting and the provision of quality, flexible child care, and
- the lack of high level female mentors to assist other women get onto boards and into board feeder roles within an organisation.
And this is despite the fact that evidence has proven over and over again that having women in leadership positions and on boards is good for business, not only by leading to improved financial and corporate results, but because it leads to improved governance, enhanced public perception of the organisation and better employee attraction and retention.
The introduction of quotas would certainly improve the gender balance on Australian boards, and would do so over a very short period of time.
But the introduction of quotas would also have the potential to encourage lip-service, forced compliance, a public questioning of the worthiness of the incumbents who were appointed under the quota requirement and a nagging worry in the minds of the incumbents themselves, about whether their appointment stemmed from merit or tokenism.
So regardless of whether Australia eventually does nothing, goes down the forced quota pathway or takes the voluntary target option, one thing is obvious.
To address the organisational culture that is the fundamental cause of the lack of gender balance on Australian boards, we need strong corporate leadership that champions gender equity for all employees, from the new recruit to the executive team and the board.
Until corporate Australia has the strategic foresight and pragmatic business sense to use such leadership to implement change across Australia’s business sector, the best that will be achieved is the continued implementation of band-aid solutions which, to the detriment of the Australia’s business sector, mask the obvious symptoms, but do little to stem the growth of the real problem.
