Women directors still struggling

It seems that while Australian boardrooms are strong on rhetoric when it comes to gender diversity, they’re not strong on any follow-up action.

The world’s biggest fund manager BlackRock has been running some numbers on the performance of Australia’s top 200 companies in this area and once again they’ve come up short.

The report was compiled by one of BlackRock’s top corporate governance executives in the Asia Pacific, Pru Bennett.

Her report card on the S&P ASX200 in 2013 found that 3 per cent were excellent, 19 per cent good and the remainder “perfunctory, poor or generally non-disclosing”.

There was some good news in that there were 33 female non-executive director appointments during the year, taking the total number of women on the top 200 boards from 17.8 per cent in 2012 to 21 per cent in 2013. However this seemed to be brought about by the fact that the number of men serving on top 200 boards were leaving faster than women.

The really dismal numbers in the report are in relation to the number of women in the ranks of the key management personnel (KMP). The proportion of women who are KMPs in ASX-listed companies in 2013 was 10 per cent, up from 8 per cent in 2012. Not a great leap forward for women executives by any measure.

Six companies received ‘gold stars’ in the BlackRock report on including Mirvac Group, Perpetual, Graincorp, Telstra Corporation, Westfield Group and Westpac Banking Corp.

These six companies were found to have excellent standards of disclosure, including policies for helping improve diversity in senior executive ranks and policies in relation to pay equity.

Bennett concludes: “Unless the CEO has accountability for implementation with meaningful reports regarding output of the diversity policy reported to the board, it is difficult to see how the policy will be really effective.”

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