Naming and Shaming Australian Boards without Women - Building Gender Balanced Business

• The organisation Women on Board has a new ranking, the Board Diversity Index, that will track the gender ratio of boards of Australian listed companies, funds and credit unions.

• The first index reports that the number on all boards it monitors was 8.7%, up 0.4 percentage point from what it would have been a year earlier.

• The group also maintains a database of more than 7,000 women who are interested in serving on boards.

• More than half of Australian blue chips do not have a single woman on the board,

• Women on Board was one of the groups that advocated for rules scheduled to take effect in mid-2010 requiring companies to make public their board and upper-management gender ratios and to report on their progress toward balance.

• Saying the group might be forced to advocate quotas if companies don’t improve, the Chair of WOB, Ruth Medd, told the Financial Standard, “A key reform is removing the major barriers to women achieving directorship roles – the lack of transparency in the current system of board appointments and an unwillingness to broaden the search beyond the narrow pool from which directors are chosen.”

The Financial Standard report