Industry regulation improving gender diversity on ASX200 boards

Women on Boards welcomes the news that more than 20 per cent of director appointments to ASX200 companies in 2010 have been women.

Executive director, Claire Braund, says this contrasts sharply with 2009, when only five percent of appointments were women.

"This excellent result has seen the number of women on ASX200 company boards increase from 8.7 per cent at the end of 2009 to 9.2 per cent in June 2010."

Ms Braund said she was expecting even more improvements by January 2011 when the changes to the ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations, requiring companies to report on gender at board and senior management levels, came into effect.

"It is quite clear that the top end of town has made a grab for female directors ahead of these amended guidelines coming into force. This clearly demonstrates that it is really not that difficult to find high performing women to sit on ASX boards."

"It also strongly supports the case for regulation to encourage companies to take action to address the paucity of women in senior ranks."

"Collecting gender data, setting targets and publicly reporting outcomes will become a whole new way of doing business for many ASX companies from 2011," Ms Braund said.

However, while the percentage of women on ASX200 boards is creeping up, there are still 101 companies in that group without a woman on their board.

"These companies clearly need to get on board on the gender issue."

"Move down the ASX and things start to look even worse. Just 4.3 per cent of board seats on ASX 201-300 companies are occupied by women (24 of 553 directors) and you could fire a cannon into the boardrooms of ASX 300 + companies and not hit a woman."

Ms Braund said that since the issue of gender diversity was debated at the Women on Boards Conference in September 2009, it had remained firmly on the public agenda.

"We are gratified that many business groups have moved to implement gender diversity programs ahead of the start date for the new ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations."

Ms Braund said while many of these programs were a step in the right direction, they were not the panacea to the wider problems of indentifying new board ready female talent and engendering cultural change in the boardrooms and workplaces across Australia.

"For this to occur we need to rethink and re-engineer our entire way of doing business - and that requires a willingness to give up the status quo," she said.

For the latest ASX300 data and the names of women on the boards of ASX200 companies go to the WOB Boardroom Diversity Index at: http://www.womenonboards.org.au/publications/bdi/index.htm

Contact Claire Braund on 02 43696006 or 0409 981781 (or call Louise Krause on 0411 604070)