Turning the tables
How can HR help get more women on the board?Some growth curves are pretty steep. Taylor Swift’s new album shifted about one million copies in its first week; viewing figures for The Great British Bake-Off have risen 1.6 million in the last year alone; the bend-in-your-pocket iPhone 6 sold 10 million units in just its opening weekend.
But don’t expect any comparable growth rates when you’re looking at the number of women making it ont
o the boards of the FTSE 100.
‘Until the Davies Report into women on boards back in 2011, progress was glacial,’ says Dr Ruth Sealy, a lecturer and researcher in Organisational Psychology at City University, London. Sealy was Deputy Director of the International Centre for Women Leaders at Cranfield School of Management, where she led the research for the annual Female FTSE Report. She’s also written and spoken extensively on issues relating to women in leadership, board composition and corporate governance.
Back in March 2011, 21 of the FTSE 100 boards were all male; now all include at least one female. But generally, the females are non-executives; only about 8% are executive directors. And across the FTSE 100, the percentage of female directors ranges greatly from an impressive 44% (well done, Diageo) to a paltry 8%.
So the Davies Report does appear to have led to some improvements. But what can HR do to improve matters further? Sealy has a list of half-a-dozen points HR folk can consider when forming the gender equality aspects of their talent management strategies.
Explicit conversations
First, she suggests making diversity an explicit focus. ‘You can’t treat an alcoholic until they realise they have a problem. So you need to address the issue head on, and have explicit conversations about what your intentions are.’
Senior leaders need to be bought in too – and preferably held accountable for supporting women’s careers. (The recommendations of the Davies Report included holding Chairs accountable for the number of women on their boards.) The senior people have ‘got to get it,’ warns Sealy. She suggests that many men on boards only truly understand the problem when their daughters hit their mid-thirties, and bring reports of cracking their heads on glass ceilings back to the dinner table.
Unconscious bias training can help, says Sealy, but it needs to be part of an integrated programme with agreed outcomes. (‘Sheep dip training often doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.’) Female talent should be nurtured through leadership programmes, and made visible through sponsorship, mentoring and exposure to senior leaders.
Sealy’s final point is to ‘adopt a holistic approach and embed conversations about female talent in on-going business processes’. This might involve some choice words with your senior executive search agency. (‘They’re the gatekeepers to the boardroom.’)
A voluntary code of conduct in 2011 saw many agencies promise to deliver long lists that were 30% female; more recently, a ‘super-code’ elite is offering the same percentage for shortlists.
Quotas or not?
No-one yet knows whether UK businesses will face quotas for women on boards. Certainly, quotas with hefty sanctions for failure have led to substantially improved gender balances in Norway and France.
But what of quota critics, who maintain that quotas are anti-democratic? Sealy smiles. ‘But the situation isn’t exactly meritocratic now,’ she says.
Sealy has a neat exercise that tests bias in gender assumptions. The story she tells goes like this:
A father and his son were involved in an accident. The father was killed and the son was seriously injured. The son was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and wheeled into an emergency operating room. A surgeon was called. Upon arrival, and seeing the patient, the surgeon exclaimed, ‘“I can’t operate, it’s my son!”
What was going on? Apparently, only 18% of men and 33% of women can explain it. (And no, they’re not a gay couple.) With figures as low as that, the quota-minded ‘something must be done’ brigade would appear to have a point.
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