Paschal Donohoe: why diversity matters

As a people we have always had a strong entrepreneurial spirit, a strong sense of business acumen. We travelled the world building cities and breaking new ground on a whole host of business frontiers. Where there was opportunity the Irish were never far behind.

The task ahead of us is to ensure that Ireland’s continued business focus provides a foundation for a more inclusive form of prosperity and builds further on our innovation.

We have to make sure that the potential business leaders of tomorrow are not side-lined because of their gender

To innovate you need to be open. Over recent months I have regularly discussed the need, and argued, for political and economic openness, in our role in the European Union. I want to restate the case for continued and increasing openness and transparency in our society, through our labour market. This must start at the top and, at these levels, unfortunately Ireland is progressing too slowly. Breaking into board membership or senior leadership teams should not be about your gender, what school you went to or your eligibility to join the “old boys’ club”. Everyone should earn their stripes and face the same challenges and, most importantly, be able to avail of opportunities equally.

Seeing the evolution in the landscape of senior business leaders in modern Ireland, I am left in no doubt as to the overwhelming benefits to us all when we embrace openness and allow fairer competitive forces to shape destinies. Increased diversity of thought and openness have been key to bringing us where we are. But we must maintain and accelerate progress. We have to make sure that the potential business leaders of tomorrow are not side-lined because of their gender. We must take the best indigenous talent and attract the best international talent.

‘Default male bias’

The feminist campaigner and author Caroline Criado-Perez writes in her extraordinary recent book Invisible Women of the habit of the “default male” bias. All of us in business and political life must renew our efforts to guard against this.

I believe we are improving in this regard and to accelerate this progress the Government is sponsoring a business-led initiative to drive gender balance in corporate leadership. Balance for Better Business set targets in May of this year for the boards of companies listed on the Euronext Dublin markets. The Review Group, co-chaired by Brid Horan and Gary Kennedy, set a target of 33 per cent females on the boards of the top 20 listed companies and 25 per cent on the boards of the smaller listed companies by 2023. The Group also set a target of no all-male boards by the end of 2020, a call that has been highlighted by my colleague, Minister David Stanton.

Our purpose with this initiative is to actively encourage and support major Irish companies to achieve better gender balance in their leadership teams. Companies cannot continue to disregard the call for change, and to ignore the proven business benefits of balance on boards. Alternative actions to drive change, such as quotas, have been successfully pursued by a number of other European countries.

While results due to be published by the Review Group next month will show significant progress on achieving the 33 per cent target, all-male boards are proving stubbornly resistant to change. To date, only one of the all-male boards identified in the May report has announced the appointment of a female director.

Balance for Better Business will continue to monitor progress among listed company boards and is extending its work in future reports to encompass leadership teams and to include leading private companies and multinational companies here in Ireland. This is important work.

To compete globally and to keep our society changing in the way we want it to, we need to bring our best players to the fore, whatever their gender. We simply cannot afford to have half of our best talent sitting on the bench or unable to avail of the equal opportunity to succeed. We cannot build the companies and economy of the future without more women on the leadership teams of our top firms. And socially we cannot tolerate a system that restricts the opportunities of our fellow citizens, our colleagues, our family and our friends like this.

I look forward to seeing business in Ireland actively embracing the opportunity to enhance performance, deepen customer understanding and improve overall governance by achieving gender balanced leadership and developing a genuinely inclusive workplace culture for all our talented workforce.