Cantillon: Promoting women is good for business

A report in Britain this week found women in banking are paid, on average, 40 per cent less than men in the same sector. Stop for a moment and think about that – it means that a male manager who is doing well enough to be paid, say £120,000, could see his female equivalent get just £72,000 for doing the same job. It’s not something any right-thinking, educated person living in a free society could tolerate, unless of course they couldn’t be bothered getting upset, which seems to be where the current body of thinking on the subject of pay equality often seems to lie.

The report, sponsored by the UK Treasury, also found women hold only 14 per cent of senior roles in a sector that employs two million and made the audacious suggestion that pay packages for the higher-ups in finance should be linked in some way to the number of women executives a given firm employs. Such a system would, however, be left up to a company itself to introduce.

The National Women’s Council of Ireland takes a vaguely similar tack when it comes to women’s seniority in companies, last year calling for greater board representation for Irish women (the EU Commission says it is at about 10 per cent for plcs), but stopping short of recommending quotas.

Meanwhile, the first general election where quotas applied for candidate selection led to the number of women in the Dáil rising from 15 per cent to 22 per cent. As NWCI director Orla O’Connor (pictured), said it took the previous 19 years for women’s representation to grow from 12 per cent to 15 per cent.

Hiring and promoting more women is good for business: the McKinsey report on diversity (mckinsey.com) found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 per cent more likely to do better than the median in their industry.