Finally, the publication of the much awaited Lord Davies review ‘Women in the Boardroom’ – and he has come down on side of no quotas, but voluntary targets, to achieve 25% female representation on Boards by 2015. And for companies to set targets for executive teams, and make disclosures about employee diversity overall.
Just as importantly, but not generally picked up as strongly in the media, was a series of recommendations and challenges to other key stakeholders to step up to the mark - regulators, investors, and headhunters for example.
For this initiative to be successful, behaviours will need to stretch way beyond finding a way to fill up the requisite number of tick-boxes, and will have to look more creatively for the talent that organisations need to be successful for the long term. And not just around female diversity either, although that’s the focus of this particular review. Much harder always to appoint people ‘not like us’ in a more risk-averse world.
Tokenism should not overtake talent.
There are many enlightened Chairmen and CEO’s for whom this is already a ‘no-brainer’ and a work in progress, and their progress should be celebrated. My concern is with the others - and a hope that tokenism does not overtake talent, mortgaging the future one more time.
Four years is not long to find out.........
A trackback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Movable Type, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.