Women in the boardroom: It's not just about quotas
Anna Blackaby asks why the region’s boardrooms are still a no-go area for women
Browsing through the annual reports and website board profiles of the region’s leading companies, a recurring theme becomes apparent.
Most board members at the top 50 quoted companies by turnover in the West Midlands are white, in their 50s or 60s and male.
This lack of diversity is raising concerns that those at the helm of the region’s firms are increasingly out of touch with the markets they serve and that decision-making on boards without a broad spectrum of views and experiences suffers as a result.
Judith Cherry, head of research and insight at lobby group Opportunity Now, believes there is a strong business case for getting more women at all levels of organisations. “It’s about getting the best talent,” she said.
“Women are 50 per cent of the population – if you want to get the best talent in your organisation, you have got to be looking at employing from all sections of the population.
“Getting a better mix of experience and skills means you have better-quality decision-making and understanding of your employees and markets. If you have a bunch of people with the same life experience and the same point of view, you get that ‘group think’ which a lot of organisations have suffered from with some quite big repercussions recently.”
As the only female chairman of a listed company in the West Midlands - Staffordshire-based Slimma - Carolyn Simons believes a conservative approach among companies recruiting for their boards means women are often unintentionally barred from the boardroom.
“I think women have succeeded quite a lot on the executive front but certainly on the non-exec side, companies are quite traditional in the thoughts they have in terms of who is suitable,” she said.
“They don’t often think ‘we must have a woman’. They make their choice through quite traditional thought processes – they want someone who has already been on lots of boards.
“Often, they want a man who has been chairman on a number of boards and is a safe pair of hands and they don’t always want to take a chance on someone a bit different. It’s a Catch-22 situation.”
The Government has rejected the suggestion from some quarters of a quota-based approach to ensuring women are represented on the boards of top firms.
Last year, Norway introduced quotas obliging companies to ensure that 40 per cent of their board members are women while Sweden and Spain are also taking a strong approach to ensuring female representation.
But although business bodies in the UK acknowledge that more needs to be done to ensure women are better represented on boards, most are against setting targets. Sally Hannah, the Confederation of British Industry’s assistant regional director for the West Midlands & Oxfordshire, said: “Setting quotas is not the best way forward, as the issue is about attracting and retaining talent and customers, rather than numbers.”
