UK Group Sees Quotas as Only Way to Limit Crisis's Outsized Effect on Women - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Warning that “the advances made by women in the workplace during the past twenty years are currently at risk”, the advocacy group Fawcett Society is calling on the British government to take bold action to limit the effect of the economic crisis on working women.

• “Not only have male dominated decisions plotted the course into recession, political and business decisions about how we exit from this recession, who faces redundancy, etc., continue to be made mostly by men,” Fawcett’s report says.

• Only 12% of directors on FTSE-100 boards are women, Fawcett notes, and at the current rate of growth it will be 73 more years before there is parity in those boardrooms. Thus, Fawcett calls for quotas to speed the process, for the sake of women, companies and the UK economy. (The report does not stipulate any quota level but points out such quotas raised the share of women in Norwegian boardrooms from 6% to 44% in six years.)

• A quota system, the group argues, would place more emphasis on women’s value in the workplace. “Fawcett is calling on the Government to adopt quotas for FTSE companies to ensure better governance across the corporate sector.”

• Katherine Rake, director of Fawcett, was quoted by Personnel Today as saying: “This recession must not be used as an excuse to send women back to the kitchen. Women are now looking to the government to send out a strong signal to businesses that it will not compromise on women’s rights.”

To download the 9-page Fawcett Society report