Diane Foreman by Diane Foreman

Author:Diane Foreman [Diane Foreman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775538172
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

32

Building board-ready women

In July 2012, and under pressure to get more women on to public company boards, the NZX (New Zealand’s registered securities exchange and the operator of its capital markets) approved what it called a new Diversity Listing Rule.

From that date, every company listed on New Zealand’s main board would be required to give an annual breakdown of its number of women directors and senior officers. And, if the company had a formal diversity policy, it would be required to report on how well that was working.

Not very well, it would seem. The NZX’s latest figures, reported to the market in February 2014, show only 14 per cent of directors are women, up slightly from 12 per cent in 2013. In hard numbers, NZX-listed companies have 569 male directors and 96 female. Clearly women’s voices are not being heard in our boardrooms.

It’s not just a New Zealand problem. In fact, on many global indices we do pretty well. For example, on The Economist’s Glass-Ceiling Index, published to celebrate International Women’s Day on 8 March 2013, New Zealand was number five, behind Norway, Sweden, Finland and Poland, but light years ahead of Australia and the United States. Each country was measured on its higher-education gap, labour-force participation, wage gap and the number of women directors.

Norway was not only top of the list but also had the highest number of female directors. The country adopted a 40 per cent quota system in 2012 and the number of female directors has leapt from 9 per cent in 2003 to 36.1 per cent. Non-compliant companies can be dissolved by court order. But I worry that while the statistics for Norway are impressive, it will be several years before we know whether the quality of these directors is as good as we find on boards selected solely on merit.

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