Women Address Stagnation in Australian Board Diversity - Building Gender Balanced Business

• With the number of women on leading Australian corporate boards at best stagnated, leading women addressed possible solutions to the problem, ranging from techniques that help women improve their candidacies to discussion of mandatory quotas.

• Yasmin Allen, a board member at Macquarie Global Infrastructure fund and the Salvation Army, recommends selecting an industry that inspires you, rather than focusing just on companies, especially given the pace of change. “Board composition is unlikely to change too much with a short-term trend probably being to look for more sector specialists to add to the skills around the table.”

• Kate Spargo, a lawyer who has sat on several boards, warns that technical knowledge is insufficient to reach the board level. Her solutions include starting with directorships at prominent non-profits. She also emphasized networking … and for those still young enough, working hard at developing strong collegiate and just-after-university professional relationships with men.

• Spargo also notes that board positions open up quite infrequently. “Once upon a time, boards weren’t so specific in their search and maybe cast a wider net. These days, the brief is quite detailed and not gender-based.”

• With fewer than 1 in 10 ASX 200 seats held by a woman, Naseema Sparks, national president of Chief Executive Women, says quotas need to be discussed. “[N]obody wants to feel that they’re in a role to tick a box,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We understand the problem and we’re not anti the culture, but we need to have a debate about the issue.”

• “Australia is behind the world, and it’s possibly because of our culture of mateship,” Sparks said. Women’s advantages, she added, include greater “business ownership; the minus is that major companies don’t get access to that talent.”

• Robyn Watts, a board member at the Australian School of Performing Arts, called on companies to widen their nets in director searches. “There needs to be a greater effort to find good women on boards to get a gender balance.”

The Sydney Morning Herald report