Earlier today, Patrick Honohan, the governor of the Central Bank, became the 100th supporter of the ‘30% Club Ireland’, an international movement which aims to introduce gender balance into the boardrooms of businesses by having the number of women at the executive management level reach three out of 10 by 2020.
It’s a question raised every time we try to figure out a way to smash through the glass ceiling, and one which George Hook will be asking again this evening: are quotas really the best way to get more women on boards, and will quotas keep them at the table?
Joining George live in studio this evening was Marie O’Connor, a partner at PwC and the leader of the Irish branch of the ‘30% Club’. To hear what she had to say, click here:
Ms O’Connor may well have her work cut out for her, as Ireland has yet to introduce legislation implementing gender quotas in either business or political spheres, lagging behind many European nations. But if recent research commissioned by the wealth and asset management firm BNY Mellon is to be believed, for the better inclusion of women in business, government legislation might not be the best solution.
The study, carried out by Cambridge professor Sucheta Nadkarni, an expert in management, suggests that when it comes to ensuring that women get promoted to company boards – and that they retain their position on them – the female workforce is better served by a country’s ‘female economic power’ and a corporate, rather than legislative, code of promoting women.
In short, this means that the number of years girls spend in formal education, the level of female involvement in employment, and a company policy that addresses gender diversity carries more power at the successful integration of women in the executive management level than laws brought through parliaments.
Legally-mandated gender quotas achieve the goal of getting women onto boards, but the research shows that they do not necessarily guarantee that those women will stay on them. Worse still, the Cambridge study also revealed that the political influence of women in parliaments and at cabinets also paled in comparison to a company’s own due diligence and economic power of female employees.
BNY Mellon collected statistics from more than half of the companies ranked on the Forbes Global 2,000 list from 2013. The data sampled was wide ranging, taking in more than 40 countries around the world, and collating information from 2004 onwards.
The research, presented by Professor Nadkarni at Womenomics, a conference organised by BNY Mellon to promote gender diversity in the workplace, outlined the best policies enacted by global corporations and business to improve the likelihood of women making it onto boards. For example, companies that offered women longer bouts of maternity leave were more likely to have women on their boards, and for those women to stay on them for longer.
And there was also some good news for women to adhere to the famous Sheryl Sandberg trick of leaning in. Assertiveness, as espoused by the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, has been proven to work, though more for the individual than the sisterhood – countries where women more aggressively pushed themselves forward – rather than relying on equality laws to give them a leg up – saw fewer women on boards, but women who kept their place on them for longer.
