Last month Mervyn Davies published his fourth annual review looking at women on boards. It made for fairly positive reading if you are generally inclined to believe that enhanced senior female participation in the workplace is a good thing … and if you are reading this article I assume you are! Women’s representation on FTSE 100 boards now stands at 23.5 per cent, almost double where it was when Davies was commissioned in 2011 and the number stood at a fairly ‘meh’ 12.5 per cent. This is pleasingly near the 25 per cent target and I am sure that Davies and his team are feeling pretty chuffed about that. The representation of women on the FTSE 250 has more than doubled to 18 per cent, up from 7.8 per cent in 2011. Furthermore there are now no all-male boards in the FTSE 100, which is a milestone event in the history of the London Stock Exchange. There remain 23 all-male boards in the FTSE 250, but this is down from 131 all-male boards in 2011 and 48 this time last year.
Happy days.
But there are some niggles. Despite being a big fan of this commission it feels a little peripheral – making strides at the tip of the iceberg rather than at the bottom. I declare at this point that I am a fan of quotas and have no issue with a top-down approach to effect a necessary and positive change that is not happening on its own. So it is not the work of the commission that I take issue with, rather the lack of proactive programmes and initiatives further down the food chain that ought to be happening concurrently in order to really shift the dial on how women work and contribute to our economy.
Davies’ achievements would be infinitely better if at the same time other changes were being made too: on the cost of childcare, so working mothers, and fathers, could afford to return to work; flexible working regulations were being altered especially at the lower end of the female labour markets where zero-hours contracts put those which urgent care requirements at risk of losing their job; parental leave schemes were actually incentivising fathers to take up leave offers, get paid properly while doing it and removing the stigma that still pervades of fathers taking time off to look after their children. There will never be better female inclusivity while childcare is principally a woman’s concern.
And now would be the time. As the election campaign gets into its stride, the Labour party sets a pink bus on the road. The colour does not bother me. The feeling that it is gesture politics does. The female vote wins elections and in one that is too close to call it would be savvy to put equality and diversity issues at the heart of any campaign. If the battleground for No 10 is the economy then put women at the centre of our recovery. Let us empower the 2.4 million who could work but do not and have the potential to generate a seven per cent increase in GDP if they did.
It is going to take more than Davies tinkering with boards to create a new paradigm of how women contribute to economic life in the United Kingdom. It ought to be the Labour party that stridently leads this economic, social and moral imperative but a pink bus in supermarket car parks is not going to cut it.
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Rebecca Simon is co-chair of the Labour Women in Business Network
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