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360º PERSPECTIVES | ISSUE 7 | 2020/2021
Gender equity in ICT is simply good business » Women are increasingly well represented in leadership in civil society, including all tiers of government, Parliament and the judiciary.
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OWEVER, THE EQUITABLE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN in business leadership is still
a (slow) work in progress. According to the 2017 BWASA Women in Leadership census, women constitute 51% of the South African population but only 20,7% of directors, 29,4% of executive management positions and just 11,8% of board chairpersons’ positions. Only 3,3% of JSE-listed companies have female CEOs and just one Top 40 company has a woman CEO, Naspers’s Phuti Mahanyele-Dabengwa. In the ICT sector, most companies are led by men, although some large corporations have or have had women CEOs. In March 2019, UWC alumna Lillian Barnard was appointed as Managing Director of Microsoft SA, the first woman to lead the ICT giant’s South African operation. Although identified early as top talent and given opportunities that challenged her limited experience, Barnard still had to earn her spurs the hard way as a leader in ICT. After graduating with a BCom Honours at UWC in 1993, she joined IBM, kicking off a 15-year career in managing sales teams, including overall responsibility for sales and business operations in France and Switzerland, before Lillian Barnard. >
returning in 2010 to take executive responsibility for IBM’s sub-Saharan Africa partner business. “Working outside South Africa was a great opportunity in that it set my career on a new trajectory. I grew as a person, both personally and professionally, and my world view has significantly changed in a very meaningful way,” Barnard says.
