Greater Transparency Needed in Reporting Gender Balance in Top Management in the UK
Womenomics 101 survey: Focus on UK
- The UK Financial Reporting Council has recently called for better gender balance on UK corporate boards to avoid ‘group think’. We would encourage UK companies and policy makers to focus on what we believe to be an even more important indicator of how gender balanced a company actually is: the Executive Committee.
- Of the TOP 10 companies in the UK, 9 or 90% have at least one woman on their Executive Committees.
- To provide a point of comparison, in the global 20-first Womenomics 101 Survey (October 2009), 89% of American companies had at least one woman at Executive Committee level, while only 32% of European companies and 18% of Asian companies did.
- Upon closer inspection, we see that among the 100 executives that make up the Executive Committee level of the UK’s Top10 companies, 15 (or 15%) are women. Of these 15 women, 10 are in staff, or support functions, while only 5 are in line /operational roles.
- The UK, with 60 percent of university graduates that are women, can do better.
- Gender balance has been shown to correlate to better corporate performance, better return on investment, greater innovation and more stock price resilience in crises. Could UK companies recover more quickly and more sustainably if they were more gender balanced internally?
- We recommend greater – and obligatory – transparency in reporting the actual levels of gender balance in top management. This balance has a proven link to corporate performance and investors and stakeholders have the right to have access to this information.
- This survey is run globally by 20-first, one of the world’s leading gender consultancies, www.20-first.com
- The other country focus reports that have been published to date include India, Italy, France and the Netherlands
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