Women bring a lot to business at every level. But why are they just 7.5% of Irish boards?

THE NUMBERS tell just part of the story, but the part they tell is the punchline. The “total joke”, as former UK trade minister Mervyn Davies puts it, is that women are almost entirely absent from the boardrooms of major companies.

Analysis by The Irish Times of the top 25 Iseq-listed companies show that just 21 of some 280 boardroom positions are occupied by women, or 7.5 per cent of the total. In the 10 biggest companies, female representation is less than 5 per cent.

This compares unfavourably to the UK, where some 14.2 per cent of FTSE 100 board seats are now held by women, up from 12.5 per cent last year.

At least part of the credit for the nudge upwards is due to the report published in February by Davies, which set a target of 25 per cent representation by 2015, with the threat of quotas hanging over companies if they don’t act. Since its publication, the number of all-male boards in the FTSE 100 has dropped from 21 to 14 – a “dramatic” fall, says Davies.

“We are saying that we want all-male company boards named and shamed,” he declares. In this task, he’s counting on the support of a media that is itself male-centric.

"The Financial Timeshave been great. All the newspapers have been great, and all the talk shows."

In Davies (aka Lord Davies of Abersoch), the UK has a prominent champion for gender diversity in corporate corridors – a Labour-appointed peer who can command the attention of David Cameron. When Davies says that “the best teams are ones where you have lots of different personalities, lots of different types, men and women”, it helps that first of all, he’s a man, and, second of all, that he’s started the sentence with the words “I’ve run a big company with 75,000 employees and...”

As a former chief executive and chairman of Hong-Kong-based bank Standard Chartered plc, Davies says he’s proud to have turned a male-dominated, expat bank into one with a diverse management team, about 60 per cent of which were women.

The rationale for more gender-balanced boards are clear cut – anything else is just “bad business sense”, he says.

“I was on many boards and the nature of the conversation is different if you have all men versus a mix of men and women. Anyone who’s been there would know that. So if you work in an industry where some of your customers are women and a big percentage of your staff are women, and there’s an all-male board, how can you expect to be in touch with your customers and your staff?”

The consultation process for the Davies report received 2,654 responses, mostly from women, and they revealed two main barriers. The first revolved around work-life balance, the second around “the male cultural environment”.

Dispiritingly, when asked how they tackled the issues posed by a male corporate culture, 8 per cent of women said they chose to leave the company or start a new career. This, the report concludes, poses something of “a circular challenge” on the role model front.

Davies says all-male boards are “bizarre” and the practice of appointing a solo “token” woman is “just a total joke” – because she inevitably ends up being “an isolated voice”, as CIÉ chairwoman Vivienne Jupp, who heads Ireland’s Board Diversity Initiative, phrases it.

But bizarre though they may be, all-male boards are not uncommon. In Ireland, Ryanair, Elan, Kerry, Dragon Oil and Aryzta – comprising half the 10 largest companies quoted on the Irish Stock Exchange - have no women on their boards, while the other half (CRH, Bank of Ireland, Paddy Power, DCC and Smurfit Kappa) have just one.

In the next tier of 15 companies, a further three have no representation, nine have one woman on the board, two companies (Irish Life Permanent and Kenmare) have two women directors, while just one company (Aer Lingus) has three.

Details of a six-month progress update on the Davies report, released to coincide with a reception in Number 10 Downing Street last week, showed that two-thirds of the FTSE 100 have ignored his call for companies make aspirational statements on the percentage of women they aim to have on their boards.

But one company that has done so is Tullow Oil, which has a dual listing in London and Dublin, and currently has one woman non-executive director. A response to the Davies report in a prominent link on its website says it shares its ambition. It adds that the oil and gas sector “has not traditionally attracted sufficient women into the talent pool”, but that its scholarship and outreach schemes will help it correct this.

Davies has limited patience with the argument that certain boards lack women because of some industry-specific shortfall of available candidates. For him, the introduction of more open-minded and transparent recruitment processes is the name of the pool-widening game.

“A lot of companies have glass ceilings for the executive committee, which makes it difficult,” he says. “It means you have to look at other ponds, or other gene pools, for women.”

In other words, headhunters and board nominations committees should be looking for candidates in the worlds of accountancy, law, HR, PR, marketing and international relations where women are more often found. Scouring the ranks of female entrepreneurs, searching the public and charities sectors, and looking internationally, also helps. If this is done, the resulting boards have a greater mix of skills, making them less likely to succumb to the scourge of the financial crisis, groupthink.

For Maura Quinn, chief executive of the Institute of Directors, improving gender balance is part of a wider need to make boardrooms more diverse in general. But she believes that women will be specific beneficiaries of what she sees as a departure from 19th-hole invitations to the boardroom.

“I genuinely do think there is a move away from the very unstructured way that boards were appointed in Ireland,” Quinn says.

While some 17 per cent of the institute’s members are women, some 23 per cent of the new members to join in 2011 were female.

“There are definite indications that more and more women are becoming company directors and seeing it as a career path.”

Quinn is hopeful that more balanced boards can be brought about by “identifying the blockages” and eliminating them, and she welcomes the UK’s “softly, softly” approach. Quotas demean the appointees, she argues, though she acknowledges “the counterview” that if nothing changes, they may be the lesser of two evils.

The Davies report uncovered “vehement opposition” to quotas, and Davies himself describes their introduction as “an admission of failure”, recommending that Ireland “get its act together” on the issue by other means first.

He’s also wary of the experience of Norway, where he says boardroom gender quotas have resulted in a relatively small number of powerful women clocking up non-executive director seats, to the detriment of other potential candidates. Such women are known, charmingly, as the “golden skirts”.

In Germany, too, where ministers in Angela Merkel’s government are pressing blue-chips to eliminate glass ceilings, there is division on whether quotas or voluntary “flexi-quotas” are appropriate.

Jupp, meanwhile, who is a former managing partner of Accenture, cites the “glacial pace” of change as part of the reason why some women are becoming keener on the idea of positive discrimination. Research by the Board Diversity Initiative indicates that, at the current rate, it will take 70 years for female participation on the boards of major Irish companies to reach even 30 per cent. She also notes the informal quotas in the public sector, which have resulted in better representation – more than one-quarter of directors on commercial State boards are women.

Davies insists that the combination of more female role models and “one or two” progressive chairmen will act as a catalyst. The latter may be influenced by what he calls “the daughter test”, whereby chairmen are shamed into action by the possibility that their daughters might be the next women to become trapped under a glass ceiling. Only a few chairmen revealed themselves during the consultation process as “prehistoric monsters”, who “didn’t understand what all the fuss was about”. But “you, the media, have just got to kill them”.

WHAT'S KEEPING WOMEN OUT OF THE BOARDROOM?

Discriminatory mentoring:Many respondents to the Davies report consultation said "there were differences in the way that men and women were mentored and sponsored, which gave men the edge over their female peers".

Undervaluation of skills:Some noted gender behavioural traits whereby women tended to undervalue their own skills and experiences. "There's so much evidence that women are not putting themselves forward," says Vivienne Jupp.

Too few role models:A "relatively low number of successful female role models", compounding stereotypes and reinforcing perceived difficulties in rising corporate ladders, was cited. Davies says more trailblazing "Anita Roddicks" are needed.

The "wrong" experience:The report states there is a perception that women in leadership positions in academia, the arts, the media, the civil service or professional services are overlooked because they do not have "specific corporate experience".

Exclusion from networks:The influence of "informal networks" on board appointments, and opaque selection criteria, were a significant barrier to women, the consultation found.