The meeting, held by The Smith Institute in association with the DTI Women and Equality Unit, was attended by an extraordinary group of business leaders, including 17 Chairmen of London’s top 100 publicly traded companies, prominent business men and women, search firms, members of Parliament and the House of Lords and representatives of key women’s business associations. Leading the presentations was Patricia Hewitt, UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and Cabinet Minister for Women. A census of the top 100 UK companies was presented by Susan Vinnicombe, Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Diversity Management at Cranfield University. Following the presentations an expert panel discussed a number of key issues. The panel included Lord Dennis Stevenson, Chairman of Pearson PLC; Laura Tyson, Dean of the London Business School and author of the Tyson report looking at ways to enhance board effectiveness by expanding the pool of candidates; Barbara Thomas Judge, Chairman of United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority; and Canadian Sheelagh Whittaker, Managing Director – Public Sector for EDS and a former member of the CWC Women on Boards Advisory Council.
“It was an honor to be there for the announcement of this superb program,” said Ms. MacKendrick. “As a comprehensive, non-legislative women on boards initiative, I believe the UK has now created the gold standard with strong government leadership combined with effective contribution from its partners in academia, business and non-governmental agencies. Together they have created a blueprint for effective action that we can all learn from. We have always believed in developing and sharing best practices, so I am very excited about taking this learning back to TIAW to share with our member networks and I believe it will help TIAW networks throughout the world move forward on this issue.”
"It's very good news that almost 1 in 5 new board appointments have gone to women, up from just 1 in 10 just two years ago, but we still have much further to go,” said Patricia Hewitt. "It's not about putting women on boards for the sake of it - we want companies to promote the best people for the job, but with almost a third of companies without a single woman on the board, my concern is that companies are not drawing from all the available talent."
The 2004 Female FTSE report released at the meeting showed that the UK’s top 100 companies are making strong progress. Women received a remarkable 17% of new director appointments and now represent 9.7% of directorships, up from 5.8% in 2000 and the number of companies with multiple women directors increased to 29%, up from 22% in 2003.
An area showing slow progress is the number of executive directorships, those held by members of the company’s management. There was little change (4.1% of executive directorships in 2004 vs. 3.7% in 2003), a statistic that “reflects the health of the “pipeline” of women executives”, said Ms. VInnicombe.
In the discussion that followed the presentations, the advisability of quotas was hotly debated, with split opinions of their usefulness in this situation, weighing short term progress against backlash and tokenism. The panelists agreed that changes to corporate culture would also be needed to support the full inclusion of women at the senior management and board levels and further, that such changes would likely have a positive overall effect on the company’s performance. Baroness Jay, non-executive director of British Telecom, said that “If we want diversity, we have to change the entire way everyone works” and dispense with the notion of “presenteeism” which prizes attendance over productivity.
The DTI’s document, Building Better Boards, also documented a number of programs to promote women board directors. They include mentoring, benchmarking and networking. In addition, the research identified new women directors in the UK, compared their experience to th
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