Gender diversity faces threat

Just months after some of Australia’s biggest companies came together to support a commitment to increasing the role of women within their organisations – and actually establishing a target of 50 per cent women in senior corporate roles within in 10 years – comes reports of a concerted effort to wind back legislation requiring companies with more than 100 employees to report gender diversity.

This would also seem to conflict with the successful 2011 introduction of diversity reporting for ASX entities.

According to Catherine Fox, one of Australia’s leading commentators on women and the workforce and a former colleague of mine at the Financial Review if large Australian corporations are able to downgrade their reporting requirements on gender diversity the continuing argument that Australian business is a male-dominated area will be hard attack. If you don’t have the statistics you don’t have an issue.

And says Fox the numbers still appear damming despite data being collected from a number of sources over the past decade. Twelve years ago the number of women in leadership roles in Australia’s top 200 companies was less than 2 per cent for CEOs and about 8 per cent for company directors

It would also be at odds with the successful 2011 introduction of diversity reporting for ASX entities. Although compliance is voluntary, the results have been positive, with 93 per cent of ASX200 and 85 per cent of ASX201-500 companies having a diversity policy and a plan to improve the gender diversity. The ASX is now working on improving the quality of the disclosure

The rumblings about stripping back the legislative regime covering unlisted companies – because of the red-tape burden on business – have been circulating for a while, along with rumours the Workplace Gender Equality Agency itself could be threatened.

The majority of ASX500 companies reported on not just the number of women employed overall, but also on those in senior ranks, and the ASX is now working on improving the quality of the disclosure.

The ASX is not alone in setting some clear goals to tackle the excruciatingly slow progress made in improving the numbers (in 2012 women made up just 3.5 per cent of CEOs in the ASX200 and 9.2 per cent of senior executives in the ASX500).

The KPMG report commissioned by the ASX found that companies with a diversity policy cite improvements to the bottom line, a broadening of the skills and experience of the workforce, and access to a broader talent pool.

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