British business still dragging its feet over female directors

Diversity is good for business, but there are some very big businesses that need kicking to wake up to that fact

The number of female directors has increased but they remain a minority (Getty)

Here’s some good news about the business world on International Women’s Day: of the UK listed companies that have employee directors, a majority have a woman among them.

Progress! Progress! But wait a minute, I hear you say, where’s the catch. Of course there is one. This is Britain, not one of Europe’s more progressive countries.

So here it is: There are only three of them. First Group, Mears Group, and, erm, Sports Direct.

The final two of those have a female employee director.

As many FTSE 350 companies have all male boards as UK quoted companies have just one employee director. So there's no cause to celebrate on either front.

As it's International Women's Day I'm going to focus on the former, and the fact that it is quite astonishing that in 2019 we still have a situation where some very big companies appear to be telling us they can't find a single qualified woman to sit in their boardrooms.

I’ve actually seen it written that by the end of the year there may be none, as if that’s something to celebrate. It really isn’t. It just serves to highlight how dismally slow progress has been on this front.

We are, remember, nearly ten years out from the launch of the Government commissioned Davis review.

It set the pathetically unambitious target of securing 25 per cent female representation on the boards of just the 100 biggest companies, as opposed to the 350 biggest, over five years.

The number of female directors has increased since then, it’s true, but it’s been a grindingly slow process and too often companies think they've done enough if they just find a woman to serve in a non executive capacity. It’s often pointed out that there are more CEOs named Dave or Steve, or whatever it is, than there are CEOs with two X chromosomes in the FTSE 100.

By the end of the year there’ll probably be more named Derek too. Dereks would seem to have a better chance of making progress, or at least rapid progress.

Let’s hear from the new chair of the Institute of Directors, Charlotte Valeur. She accused top companies of lying about it being difficult to recruit more women and minority ethnic directors in an interview.

That's an accurate assessment. We’ve all heard the excuses that are put forward, some of which are downright offensive. So I’m not going to dignify them by repeating them.

Businesses love to bang on about how meritocratic they are, how they’re focussed on choosing the best candidate regardless. The figures prove that’s just so much hogwash. If talent trumped everything, why is it that they so blithely ignore vast pools of talent. Why is the gender pay gap so high?

It’s surreal that we’re still having to talk about this when McKinsey, the management consultant, definitively demonstrated that companies with more diverse hiring practices were more profitable a couple of years ago in an admirably comprehensive piece of research that I've repeatedly referenced.

In other words, big businesses are not simply proving themselves to be discriminatory and regressive by failing to effectively address the issue. They are also ignoring cold business logic.

Valeur said she’d push for a change in the law in the absence of action. She should because it would be in the interests of the businesses she represents for her to so.

If social justice isn't your thing, chew on this: gender equality, and diversity more generally, are quite simply good for business. Businesses would just seem in need of a kick to wake them up to that fact.