Editorial: Problem for companies, not women

Opinion

Women have been in the business world in significant numbers for nearly 40 years - a working lifetime. Yet only one of our top 100 listed companies has a female chief executive.

Women fill just 8.65 per cent of seats on the boards of those 100 companies, and 60 of them have no women directors.

In Australia, where the figures are much the same, the corporate governance council of the stock exchange is proposing that listed companies be required to adopt and publish targets for increasing feminine representation on boards of directors and in their organisation.

The ASX has taken its cue from France, where a new law will force companies to put women into half their board seats within five years.

The New Zealand exchange is being urged to follow Australia's proposal.

The Human Rights Commission's equal opportunities commissioner says we have the lowest percentage of women corporate leaders in the developed world.

Female representation on the top rungs of the ladder is not even slowly improving. Here and in Australia it has actually dropped in recent years.

This picture is usually painted as a problem for women.

It is, in fact, a problem for companies.

Women contribute something different and valuable to an organisation, as all but the most insecure of men have come to recognise. Women have been present in decision-making circles for so long now that an all-male meeting feels not quite right.

There is a sense that a necessary dimension is lacking.

Companies want female faces in the photographs of their boards and executive teams, not just for appearances but for the reassurance of shareholders and the public that the firm is in touch with society and with its customers of both sexes.

It would be condescending and wrong, though, to suggest women are promoted only for these reasons. They are of course capable of climbing business and professional ladders in the same way that men do. That is why it would be unwise to adopt the Australian proposal.

Before obliging companies to set targets for female representation, the exchange would need to be certain of the reasons women are not sufficiently represented now.

It may be that the culture of corporate management inhibits or even penalises them. But it might equally be that not many women want those tasks.

It would be pointless to send companies out to fill arbitrary targets if there are not enough interested and capable candidates. It could be worse than pointless; it could result in token and substandard appointments being made simply for appearances, which would reflect unfairly on women who have risen to corporate leadership on merit.

Nearly 40 years after it was first acknowledged that women can do anything, it needs to be acknowledged that women's choices and values may not be identical with those of men.

The pay equity campaign of recent decades has partially acknowledged a difference when it blames the gap in average earnings on an undervaluation of occupations such as nursing, in which women predominate.

More broadly, it may be wondered whether women's "work-life balance" is better than men's - whether climbing a corporate ladder matters as much, and whether leading positions, once attained, are as satisfying.

Before stock exchanges start imposing arbitrary gender selection on listed companies, they should commission some dispassionate research on four decades of equal opportunity and find out precisely why so few women have reached the top of business and the professions.

After a generation of feminism, the "glass ceiling" is wearing thin.