Gender problems in British boardrooms

FORGET THE glass ceiling – the real gender problem for Britain’s boardrooms is a lack of women ready to take on the role of director, according to Kathleen O’Donovan, one of the country’s most senior non-executives.

Research by a company co-founded by Ms O’Donovan, who became the FTSE 100’s first female finance director at BTR in 1991, has found that businesses want to appoint women to their boards but cannot find enough experienced female candidates.

“Time and again, we were told there are too few women in the pipeline – too few rising up career paths, too few gaining experience in running things, too few in the top executive roles,” says the report by Bird Co Board and Executive Mentoring.

It interviewed 36 directors of FTSE companies, public-sector and not-for-profit organisations, two-thirds of them women.

Ms O’Donovan and Isabel Bird co-founded Bird Co Executive Board and Mentoring 18 months ago. It aims to coach, mentor and train 24 female executives in the coming months – and 100 over four years – to try to make them “board-ready”.

As well as Ms O’Donovan, the mentors will include Alison Carnwath, Land Securities’ new chairwoman, and Val Gooding, who is on the board of J Sainsbury and Standard Chartered Bank.

The training will cover “corporate theatre” or boardroom dynamics, how to get your voice heard on a board, corporate governance and financial matters and how to get a non-executive role.

Ms O’Donovan said: “A lot of what we have still been reading about is that there is a glass ceiling. Our point is that whether or not there may be for individuals, when you interview part of the group that chooses people to be on boards, they actually want to appoint women.

“What they are saying is ‘this is not a demand side issue, this is not because we don’t want them. We can’t find them, there aren’t enough people out there or we don’t know where to look for them’.”

Women still occupy less than 12 per cent of directorships in FTSE 100 groups.–