Women on Boards - working towards change

The Lord Davies report into Women on Boards has become a hot topic provoking many discussions and debates on social media sites around the globe.

So what is the basic message? – women are under represented at board or executive levels.  Why? – due to a variety of factors including lack of access to flexible working, difficulty achieving work life balance, not shouting about personal achievements and disillusionment with career progress.

One thing that does seem to be agreed upon is that diversity is very positive and a fresh perspective can help to improve financial performance, which in the long term produces better rewards for stakeholders in a business. 

We are now in an era where the family unit is changing.  Responsibility is shifting and men are keen to share in parental responsibility.  For years, the work place has been unfair to fathers with the expectations being on the man to work long hours in order to commit their time fully to an employer.  If society can start to break down these gender expectations and start to balance responsibility more evenly between parents at home, then it stands to reason that the balance of time available to men and women in the workplace should equalise too. 

Women may then not need to take such a long career break which must be one of the major factors contributing to career progression and the disparity in pay between men and women. 

So is this an ideal or is it achievable?  Lord Davies is not recommending in the UK that we go for quotas, alternatively he recommends that we work towards a certain percentage of representation, which for FTSE100 companies is a minimum of 25% female representation on their boards by 2015.

In respect of smaller and medium sized enterprises, it will really be down to the individual companies to put this into practice, and it is hopeful that they might mirror the changes that are being made in the very top level firms. 

It will be a long process and it is unlikely to be an easy one.  But with more professional role models for women, and better support networks both in the workplace and at home, I personally hope that, as we represent half of the population, we can start to make a change.
Fleur Holden - 20 April 2011