Wong wants more women on board

Sue Sheldon, Pansy Wong, Liz Coutts and Joan Withers discuss how to get more women into the corporate sector's top jobs. Photo / Richard Robinson

If you want a woman on your board Pansy Wong will give you a list of potential candidates.

That's the extent to which the Women's Affairs Minister is prepared to go to address New Zealand's dismal record of women at the top of the corporate sector.

Just 8.6 per cent of NZSX top 100 directors are female, a figure that Wong says people are still surprised at when she quotes it to them.

Despite a decade or more of debate that number has hardly moved, and the minister has taken up the cudgels with renewed vigour.

However, she stops short of pushing for formal change - such as the Australian stock exchange's proposal that public companies be required to set targets for putting more women in senior positions.

Whether the NZX follows its Australian counterpart is its own affair, Wong says, but she has spoken to the chairman and he is supportive of her efforts.

"They know that I'm extremely passionate about the case, but mine is about people doing the right thing."

Her ministry has driven the publication of a business case for more women on boards, written with the Institute of Directors and Business New Zealand, and Wong believes the necessary business/government partnership on the issue is now in place.

She has also been meeting board chairwomen and directors around the country to enlist their support.

And she has written to every NZSX 100 chief executive and chairperson - a mailout, she notes wryly, that included just four female names.

She is focusing on women directors rather than women in senior management because it is the board that sets the direction for a company. However, given half a chance she will "push the other buttons" as well.

Wong says one of the barriers to get over is the defensive attitude - taken even by women directors - that addressing the imbalance means appointing people on the basis of gender rather than merit.

"What makes you think appointment on merit is mutually exclusive to appointment of women directors?"

Another issue is the need for a transparent process in appointing board directors, which the Institute of Directors is now pushing.

Wong says recruitment companies say they are increasingly being used in the search for new directors.

Companies must be encouraged to tap into non-traditional networks such as the Ministry of Women's Affairs' nomination service which has a database of 2000 women.

Wong says the bottom line is business and the economy is missing out, with research consistently showing boardrooms with more women outperform those with few or none.

To lift the proportion of females in the top 100 boardrooms from 8.6 per cent to 15 per cent would require just 32 more women, she points out.

"How hard is that?"