New Zealand Minister of Women's Affairs on Getting More Women on Boards - Building Gender Balanced Business

• New Zealand Minister of Women’s Affairs Pansy Wong expresses surprise at the slow but finally building debate brought on by a government-business sector effort to highlight the number of women on company boards and the need to improve diversity on those boards.

• Just 8.6% of the directors of the top 100 NZ companies are women, she writes: “In this day and age this is a statistic that is, frankly, jaw-dropping.”

• “But over the past six months we have seen a steady flow of debate and the signs for change are looking positive.”

• “Currently,” Wong adds, “I am working with public company chairs and women directors to bridge the supply and demand mismatch arguments.”

• The “couple of rebuffs,” she reports receiving “were on the ground that companies only appoint directors on merit and not on gender. However, I find it intriguing that ‘appointment on merit’ seems to be mutually exclusive to the subject of appointing women directors.”

• “[I]t seems to me that the difficult part of lifting women representation in the boardroom is changing the attitude that a woman director can’t be appointed on merit alone.”

• “If the hardest part is finding women, there are plenty of networks out there that companies can tap into and there are plenty of recruitment agencies that have highly-qualified women in their books that would be perfect for any number of positions.”

Pansy Wong’s commentary in The New Zealand Herald