8 minute read
Women on Boards
Tamara Box Talks to Joanne Skolnick about the Progress of Women on Boards
Tamara Box is the Managing Partner for Europe and the Middle East at Reed Smith LLP and a Founding Member of the 30% Club’s Steering Committee.
Can you please tell us a bit about your background?
I’m a transplanted Texan but I’ve now been in the UK longer than I lived in the US, so I mostly consider myself a Brit but for this pesky accent. I came to the UK to complete my economics degree at the London School of Economics and fell in love with London and learning. I went back to the US to do a law degree at Georgetown University Law Center, then worked in New York and Singapore before I finally got back to London in 1997.
As a structured finance lawyer, I’ve worked in six law firms, five of them as a partner. I’ve been at Reed Smith for just over 11 years, including on our global board for eight years and in our senior management team for over six years. Prior to joining senior management, I ran our largest practice group, the Financial Industry Group.
What is the 30% Club and why did you help found it?
The 30% Club is a business campaign started in 2010 with the mission of boosting the number of women in board seats and executive leadership of companies all over the world. By showing board chairs the value of having gender diversity on their boards, we have enlisted the support of over 1,000 of them worldwide to help achieve that goal.
I wanted to be a part of this groundbreaking initiative because I believe in women’s equality and I know that women are an asset to businesses; marrying those two principles brought about the 30% Club.
When the 30% Club started out in the UK, women made up just 12% of the UK’s largest company boards. Should it now be called the 50% Club since 40% of board members on the FTSE 350 are women? Is parity now the goal?
The 30% Club will remain the 30% Club because that number – 30% – is the tipping point. Studies have shown that when women are 30% of a group, whether on a board or a senior executive team, they are able to influence results and change staid, entrenched views by bringing a different perspective to the group. Once that tipping point is reached, momentum takes over and the group populates itself according to the skills
The 30% Club started in the UK and there has been tremendous progress here. But in some other jurisdictions, we’re nowhere near 30% yet.
What are your views on the progress women have made to date?
While the number of women on boards has appeared to be increasing rapidly, we need to look beneath the surface and see that most of those positions are non-executive. That’s not to diminish the contributions of non-executive directors. But it is important to see where we still need to integrate women into the decision-making circles of our FTSE companies, namely in the senior management teams, or C-suites. Businesses would benefit, and the boards would also benefit, as more women would be able to move to NED positions after having held executive director positions, bringing an added dimension to their governance.
But the executive pipeline has barely moved in all these years. The number of women CEOs and chairs remains largely in the single digits. While there has been a lot of progress, there is still quite a distance to go, to a greater degree in some places than others..
Does the fact that the UK reached the 40% milestone through voluntary measures alone mean that mandatory measures such as those adopted by Norway and those which will be implemented throughout the EU are not needed?
Voluntary is doable and the UK has proven that. Government pressure and support has made a difference.
With quotas, the requirement is to have a certain number of women on the board. Some women serve on multiple boards so that there is not real diversity. One of the problems associated with quotas is the “golden skirt” phenomenon, where one woman is tapped to hold board positions in a
number of companies simultaneously. It’s insulting to our gender to assume that there are so few women out there who could be good NEDs that we have to keep going back to the same ‘well’ for the next company appointment. Yet some companies chose to meet the quota quickly by appointing the first woman whose name came up as an existing board member.
On the other hand, some companies won’t change anything without either a carrot or a stick encouraging them to do so. For those companies, the quota was the stimulus that started the ball rolling. Although we never imposed quotas in the UK, we did initiate some carrots and sticks in the form of publicly revealing the gender breakdown on the boards of each FTSE company. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as we say. Giving publicity to a company’s success or failure in meeting the targets served that purpose.
Are compulsory quotas for women on boards the quickest way to achieve gender equality? Is there any place for mandatory measures where companies who fail to meet certain targets are sanctioned?
To date, we have functioned on the basis that self-reporting will expose the outliers and the stubbornly intransigent. “Comply or explain” is the primary approach of the Financial Reporting Council, for example. If we want change to occur faster or more extensively, perhaps we should consider additional sunlight rather than sanctions. Businesses shouldn’t get away with saying they can’t find qualified women. There are qualified women out there, so it just remains for businesses to be sure to be cultivating their talent and choosing well for their business needs.
You can look at a picture of a team that has half women, half men and think that this shows equality. It doesn’t. Equality is a state of mind, an inclusivity that respects the views and contributions of each person equally. But unconscious bias from centuries of traditional patriarchal business philosophies gets in the way of equality and it exists in the minds of both men and women. Changing that starts with role models –women in roles traditionally held by men, and men in roles traditionally held by women – so that the unconscious mind no longer associates a particular role with a particular gender. To effect real, long-lasting change, we have to change the implicit bias to ensure that we all actually believe that women are equal.
According to research, more diverse companies outperform less diverse ones. Why do you think that is the case?
That’s easy: they are more open to novel ideas and less subject to the “groupthink” that causes companies to keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Utilising a full range of cognitive diversity, companies are more likely to consider new ways of doing business, new markets to explore and better ways to attract talent. In short, they create a better company and that shows up in their financial performance.
Volumes of research support the value of diversity on boards and in business more widely, from greater innovation and risk aversion to improved financial performance.
What suggestions would you have for women who are trying to join corporate or charity boards?
Always keep learning. If you have been siloed in a particular line of work, branch out and learn other aspects of corporate decision-making. Don’t be afraid to move laterally in your career; every new thing you learn by doing a different type
of work will be valuable to a company who is looking for governance across a range of disciplines.
Volunteer with charities and organisations in order to gain some experience in governance. Seek out mentors who can help you fill in the gaps in your experience or knowledge. If you want to be on a particular board, learn everything you can about that business: its strategy, its markets, its objectives and its leadership. You are looking for organisations with whom you have compatibility – you believe in them – and therefore want to do your best to help them succeed.
Although considerable progress has been made, what more needs to be done?
The short answer is that we need to ensure that women are equally represented in the executive teams of companies, not just the boards. That would bring immediate benefit to the companies and would give women the role models needed for the next generation.
The longer answer involves inclusion and respect, a subject that entails re-examining the unconscious hierarchies of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability and any other genetic or physical feature that might be used to assign places in the pecking order. These hierarchies are the enemy of equality; no one is inherently “better” than anyone else.
