Gender Diversity Of Your Board – A Best Business Practice
By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL
By Rob Wright
I recently posted a blog entitled “The Pink Elephant in the Room.” This generated a substantial amount of email responses. As I began to sort through them, I was delighted to see that some of the responses were from executives within the pharmaceutical industry. With permission, I wanted to share some thoughts from one CEO.
CEO Responds
“All good points, Pink Male! And thank you very much for pointing this out.” This person goes on to write, “The speaker issue is a problem everywhere. When I was a member of a national medical organization back in the early 1990s, we created a list of high-level government and academic women and their research topics. We would then provide it to meeting organizers with the hope that the list would trigger an opportunity to put women on the podium. It worked, sort of, in that there was at least one woman speaker at every one of this organization’s meetings.”
“During the mid-1990s, I was attending a meeting of another medical organization. I leafed through the meeting brochure, which had a description of the association’s start and subsequent history. This organization had many famous women members. Yet, in its 100 year history, the society had never had a woman president, councilor, officer, session convener, speaker, or recipient of any award. I leaned over and pointed this out to the person sitting next to me. This Harvard professor, grabbed my program, looked through it, and said “I’ll be damned!” He went on to become president of this organization and soon began appointing women to various offices. Within a few years, the organization appointed its first woman president.”
“This year I was on a conference program committee. As I looked through the more than 175 suggested sessions for this year’s meeting, I began to notice there were no women speakers. So, I began to include in my critique that the sessions were not very diverse and the conference should be recruiting at least one woman. When I went to the final selection meeting, I had to explain what “not diverse” meant to the chairs of the program committee. Conference staffers told me the lack of diversity was a chronic complaint about past sessions. Together, we worked to develop program sessions which had ‘diverse’ speakers. I don’t think any of this is sinister. I believe it’s just not part of the collective conscience. People have to be reminded how odd it looks these days to have NO women in visible positions. We, ourselves, need to work harder to bring attention to the lack of women in positions of power, on boards, or in speaker slots.”
Much Work Remains
From my decidedly male perspective, leaders, regardless of gender, need to strive for gender diversity on their executive teams, in their conferences, and throughout their organizations. Research has shown that doing so is in not a means of appeasement, but a best business practice. The 2011 Women on Boards Report is produced by GovernanceMetrics International (GMI), a leading independent global corporate governance research firm. GMI conducted an analysis of S&P 500 companies and found those without any women on their boards averaged 5.8 (on a scale of 1.0 to 10) on the GMI Home Market Corporate Governance rating. Companies with 30% or more female directors averaged a much higher rating — 8.1. The top 10 S&P 500 GMI rated companies average 22% of women on their boards, while the bottom 10 average 13%. According to this recently published report, 40% percent of the world’s largest publicly listed companies have yet to appoint one woman to their boards. Want to learn more? The report is available as a free download from the GovernanceMetrics International website.