There was some encouraging news in the push towards gender equality in boardrooms this week, as a Government-sponsored report said 31 per cent of directors on the biggest Irish-listed companies are women, breaching a key threshold. But as welcome as this is, the Balance for Better Business report can’t gloss over a glaring issue – the number of women directors may be growing, but the number of women executive directors, the real powerbrokers in business, remains desperately low at one-in-10.
In the Iseq20 (the largest 20 businesses listed on the exchange in Dublin), there are currently 40 executive directors – board members who are also senior executives working day-to-day in the business. Just four of them are women. Francesca McDonagh is chief executive of Bank of Ireland, Siobhán Talbot is group managing director of Glanbia, and Margaret Sweeney is chief executive of IRES. Marguerite Larkin of Kerry Group is the sole woman chief financial officer in the Iseq 20 who also sits on the company board.
Kingspan has four executive directors, and not a single one of them is a woman. Dalata Hotel Group, Uniphar and Glenveagh Properties each have three executive directors, all men (Dalata's new chief financial officer, Carol Phelan, has not yet joined the board of the company).
For companies that are concerned about the optics of boardroom gender equality, it is clearly much easier to appoint women non-executive directors to bump up the numbers than it is to promote women through the ranks into top management positions.
The route from the chief financial officer role to chief executive is a well-worn one. With just two women chief financial officers in situ at Ireland’s biggest listed businesses, where is the pipeline to supply future woman CEOs to rank alongside McDonagh, Talbot and Sweeney?
There is an understandable focus on promoting gender equality in the boardroom. But if companies tried harder to help women reach the executive suite, gender equality in the boardroom would follow as a matter of course.
