Is positive discrimination the way ahead for women?

Transcript

The chair of a female executive’s organization speaks to World Finance about how positive discrimination allows women to move beyond the bottom rungs of a company ladder to make it to the C-Suite level.

Germany has joined a growing number of eurozone countries that are legally requiring corporations to meet female board member quotas. Now, is positive discrimination the way ahead? Rowena Ironside, Chair of Women on Boards UK, joins me with her thoughts. 

World Finance: Rowena, right off the bat, do you think we’re heading in a positive direction?

Rowena Ironside: I certainly think that if you look at what’s happening in the top companies in the UK, FTSE 100, we’ve had real progress in the boardroom in the last four years. We had the Lord Davies report in 2011, and there’s been a lot of media interest, and a lot of pressure from the government to try and meet those targets, those 25 percent by 2015. So we’ve double the number of women in the FTSE 100 boards in those four years, so real progress here yes.

World Finance: So you seem to be an advocate of the idea of upping the numerical order, so you want to see that quota increase. But what sort of qualitative difference do you think that achieves at the board level?

Rowena Ironside: So I think leadership of organisations of society needs to be representative if you like of society. There’s no excuse nowadays with women graduating at the same rate as men, if not better, from universities. We ought to be seeing more women at the top than we are. That’s why we are getting now, involved in putting some pressure on organisations to have a look at what they are doing with their talent and work out why there are still so few women at the top.

I think there can’t be any doubt now that there are plenty of qualified women, and there is no doubt in my mind that organisations, politics, society, need to be run by people who are well qualified. It is about why aren’t some of those people who clearly are ready and eager to take on the roles making it through?

World Finance: Sometimes when I see marketing around increasing the participation of women, the focus is on the unique traits that women have, perhaps in being able to juggle multiple tasks, that sort of thing. Do you think in some ways focussing on these spurious debates in any way insults the gender as a whole?

Rowena Ironside: I think it comes down to the fact that men and women are different, and they do bring different qualities, different perspectives and different priorities to the boardroom, they will hear different things sometimes, and it is that mix of the two I think that really strengthens organisations and society.

World Finance: Rowena you have decades of executive level experience. Do you see a fundamental difference in the way women are perceived at the top tier?

Rowena Ironside: I think women who’ve made it to the top normally are taken at face value. I’ve worked in a lot of tech organisations which actually had female executives, and personally I didn’t notice when I was the only woman. There was enough going on and enough other women around.

I don’t think once you’ve got through to the top level, you have a problem. It is getting through some of those final hurdles that seems to be where women are getting stuck, and institutional injustice if you like, mostly unmeant and unseen, is actually making it more difficult for them than it is for men.

World Finance: What else would you like to see happen in terms of leadership and getting women to that top tier level in the boardroom?

Rowena Ironside: I think probably the single most important element is disclosing data. One of the problems at the moment is people assume. So boards assume the reason that women aren’t moving up is because they make other choices, and if you get a firm to actually look at its workforce gender composition, and how that shifts from entry level through to senior management, that data will start to pinpoint where things are going wrong.

It may be a person problem, it may be a process problem, but without that data people will carry on assuming and so encouragement, whether it’s about equal pay or whether it’s about gender workforce composition, encouragement for firms to actually at least know it themselves and possibly make it public so other people can hold their feet to the fire where there are problems, I think is the most important thing.

World Finance: OK, well let’s see how those changes come into play in the near future. Rowena Ironside, thank you so much for joining me today.

Rowena Ironside: Thank you.