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More women needed in boardrooms say FSP

The head of the Financial Skills Partnership has praised Government efforts to encourage more women into the boardroom, but is calling on businesses to do more to even the balance for the future.

A year after the launch of his report on boardroom diversity, Lord Davies has commended efforts made by top companies to get women into senior positions, but also noted that there are still some businesses who are still failing to meet targets.

In his 2011 report, Lord Davies called ob FTSE 100 companies to ensure they had a minimum of 25% of female board members by 2012. While this has risen from 12.5% in 2010 to 15% in 2012, online 26% of new board appointments made since last March were women.

Liz Field, CEO of the the Financial Skills Partnership believes that businesses need to make more strategic moves to create a positive cultural environment for potential female leaders of the future.

She commented: “There are clear signs that the industry is beginning to tackle boardroom diversity issues, but there are, however, major concerns around sustaining the momentum.

“The debate should also be broadened to SMEs, which make up 99% of the private sector.

“We do not know if diversity is an issue in SMEs, or what support they need. There should be more investigation and research into what SMEs are doing in terms of diversity in order to develop a clearer picture.”

Businesses have adopted a range of strategies to implement diversity issues into their business, including appointing senior executives as diversity champions through long term development programmes, mentoring schemes and female business networks.

Enterprise-wide change is also being implemented according to the Financial Skills Partnership, who found that companies are finding flexible working practices, communications, e-learning campaigns, better diversity monitoring and initiatives to remove unconscious bias.

Liz Field added: “There are encouraging examples from a large number of companies within the financial services sector.

“The key change in many companies is that they now realise their task is to bring about transformative change, not just an incremental increase in numbers.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .