Women are not filtering up: Business leaders
28/09/2011
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The Diversity Council of Australia (DCA) hosted its first annual diversity debate last week, with the topic, ‘Quotas: friend or foe of business?’ hotly debated by high profile business leaders.At the end of the debate the room of industry heavyweights, which included representatives from business giants such as IBM and PricewaterhouseCoopers, voted that quotas, (not just targets) for women on boards should be mandated by the federal government.
Indeed, the topic of gender inequality in the Australian workforce has gathered widespread media attention in recent months, with organisations around the country hosting seminars and conferences addressing the ongoing issue of gender equality.
In Adelaide this month a panel of female business leaders were assembled bythe Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), and concluded that monitored targets or quotas are necessary to give women a boost up the corporate ladder.
The panel, which included National Australia Bank (NAB) senior executive, Joanna White, advertising executive and lecturer, Jane Caro, and Australian Financial Review (AFR) magazine deputy editor, Catherine Fox, told the forum that companies with a greater proportion of women on their executive and at board level perform better.
Caro said while Australian women were amongst the best educated in the world, they ranked somewhere near 50th in the world for workforce participation.
Caro added that organisational structures need to be modified to allow women to offer a dissenting view, and said “It can be particularly hard to be courageous when you are the only one of a kind in a room, in a conference or on a board.”
Speaking at the DCA debate, Uschi Schreiber, deputy CEO Ernst & Young, said the time had passed to simply wait for gender equality to reach boards, because it was clear that women were “simply not filtering up the ladder”.
Schreiber said “We’ve seen that not all talk leads to action”, and that the quota percentage should be a ‘no-brainer’ and sit at 50%.
In her address at the debate, she said she believed that with more women in the top jobs, the entire outlook of employment and the workforce would look completely different. “Flexible work options would not be a revelation- they would ‘just be’,” Schreiber said.
Yet, speaking for the negative, Danny Gilbert, managing partner Gilbert and Tobin, warned that if quotas were put in place, some would say that women had reached those top jobs through government mandates and not merit. Gilbert said that setting targets, and not quotas, would result in true change.