An initiative is seeking to make women here more visible for board positions
WOMEN ARE still under-represented on the corporate boards of Ireland, accounting for just 10 per cent of non-executive directors at top public companies – and there is no indication this will change any time soon. Indeed, if the rate at which women are getting appointed to boards stays the same, it will take another 70 years before participation by women gets up even to 30 per cent.
An initiative is attempting to rectify the situation. Formed by Vivienne Jupp, a management consultant and former managing partner of Accenture, and Anne Marie Taylor, a former senior executive at Accenture, the Board Diversity Initiative is trying to make women more visible for board positions.
At present, of the 24 largest Irish plc companies, 40 per cent have no women on their boards, a further 40 per cent have just one, and only 20 per cent have two or more, according to research by Jupp and Taylor.
In the public sector, where there is a target of 40 per cent participation by women on boards, the record is better. Women make up 27 per cent of commercial State boards, and 33 per cent of substantial Government bodies. Bord Gáis has a chairwoman, Rose Hynes.
It will take a significant change for the situation to improve. Even if the “glacial pace of change”, as Jupp puts it, increased, with women accounting for 30 per cent of all new appointees by 2015, they would still only comprise 20 per cent of boards.
It would require every second board appointment to be a woman in order to boost the proportion to 25 per cent by 2013. But with women dropping off boards as quickly as they are being appointed, this is unlikely to happen.
Jupp and her colleague have submitted a list of 40 suitably qualified women, who are willing and able to act as non-executive directors, to the boards of corporates and Government bodies/semi-States. “It’s about making chairs of boards aware of the highly qualified pool of women that are willing to sit on boards,” says Jupp.
Jupp herself sits on three boards – those of Grafton Employment Group, the Irish Hospice Foundation and the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School – and has her own name on the list, “in order to encourage others to do so”, she says.
Candidates for the list are judged on criteria such as length and seniority of experience. According to Jupp, those on the list have attained very senior positions. Twenty per cent of candidates are retired, with the rest in full-time employment. However, the “vast majority” have never sat on a board.
There is a certain intransigence on the part of boards when it comes to changing their dynamic – and a misconception of what highly qualified women can bring to the equation. A recent Institute of Directors (IoD) survey revealed more than 40 per cent of directors of public companies consider their boards to be sufficiently gender-diverse.
To overcome the imbalance, other European countries, Spain, France and Norway, have introduced quotas. In Norway, women now make up 38 per cent of boards.
While there may not be support for such an approach in Ireland – that IoD survey showed two-thirds of Irish directors were not in favour of a formal quota – for Jupp, such an approach might be necessary. “At the current, glacial rate of change, it will take several generations before women even get to 25 per cent of board membership. So at this stage, I have come around to supporting the need for rules or quotas to bring about change,” she says.
Are men keeping women out of boards, or do women exclude themselves on grounds they don’t feel qualified, or can’t commit to the extra time needed? Jupp doesn’t think so. However, not all the women approached to participate were willing to go forward. Some declined, she says, due to the nature of their current role, or the demands on their lives.
So far, the diversity initiative has had some success. Two of the women on the list have been appointed to boards, and Jupp was recently named as the new chairwoman of CIÉ. She remains hopeful more can be achieved.
