Gender Diversity on Boards & in the Workplace

Wow what a cluster fluff of opinion & little data but lots of aims & targets.

Are Boards & Workplaces better off with better or more even diversity?

What's better off (what improves) and what exactly do you mean by diversity?

Under law you can't discriminate on someone's attributes. Their gender, race, religion, political view, sexual orientation, marital status. And for good reason, its unfair to.

Having said that, some workplaces are gender dominated by men or by women. That's life.

Yes the majority of truck drivers or anything in the transport industry are men by a margin of roughly 4 to 1. In that industry, performance is key and whilst men dominate in numbers, the percentage or good vs bad operators is probably the same for both genders. It makes little discernable difference.

Healthcare & social services, roughly identical ratio but its women who are in the majority. Again the percentage of good vs not good is probably the same so again little or no discernable difference.

More men that women choose transport, more women than men choose health. Its a choice.

Studies have shown that men are more likely to choose overtime & working away whilst women are more likely to be drawn to flexible hours, less likely to work away from home, family & friends. These are neither weaknesses or strengths, they're just the way it goes and people can decide what they do.

So is it proven that an equal number of men & women on a board leads to greater benefits to the board & the company?

Well what studies there are, its pretty inconclusive. What is known at this point is the most effective & successful boards have the most effective & successful directors, CEOs, processes & support staff.

The most effective & successful boards usually have Director Performance reviews to assess the directors & to identify required skills that are missing or areas a particular director needs to build on.

Because effective & successful boards have Director Education Programmes tailored to the whole board & the individual directors. To build their skillset & ramp board performance.

The most effective & successful boards also assess their CEO and the running of the board meeting, the meeting papers and have well fitting policies & procedures as well as good governance. A board's job is to bring strategic thinking, the management is to install it by using their strategic planning.

The most effective & successful boards also have good strategy formulation and monitoring systems.

So far none of these things are gender specific or gender slanted.

The most effective & successful boards probably know that perception is a thing and right now gender diversity is a real big thing. They also know they need to work hard to get the best directors of the female crop. There aren't as many female directors as male. In fact the rough estimate is there are 2 male directors to every female directors.

So if the competency is the roughly the same in percentage for each gender then the pool of really good female directors is roughly half what the really good male directors is. Its just a percentage  based on the scale of the numbers so if you're an effective & successful board you know having some gender diversity is a good look & if you get the best female directors you're no worse off, possibly depending on skill sets better off...and your shareholders perceive the gender balance to be great.

So if a board is all male or all female it probably makes very little difference to director skills.

But the best boards will get the best female directors.

The rights and responsibilities of a director are the same whether you're male or female.

You legal duties, your fiduciary duty all the same whether you're male or female.

If you're a nurse, a plumber, a director, a pilot, a teacher, a CEO your performance is down to you, not your gender.

Should we be setting targets for gender diversity in transport, education, labouring, health, parliament, senior management or boards?

Some strong views out there but for me, its a no. We should provide equal opportunity and allow people to sink or swim on their own performance. We should tell people they can pursue any career they want but if they don't meet the required standards in that field then its probably not the job for them & they should look at other work, other careers. Not everyone can be a miner or a MP or a shearer or receptionist. Gender is not really a big deal, personal performance is.

In broad terms these are some established & widely accepted board aspects, none of which are entirely gender specific when it comes to effectiveness & success...

The Board of Directors is a control governance mechanism, aimed to monitor managerial activities so as to mitigate agency costs (Jensen, 1993), and to set the strategic objectives which should orientate the course of the company (Hillman and Dalziel, 2003). The Board's supervisory tasks include: monitoring the CEO, and the implementation of the firms long term strategy, firing and hiring the CEO and assessing and rewarding the CEO/top managers of the firm (Hillman and Dalziel, 2003).

So if you want more women on your board (or in parliament) go for it. Get the very best women you can, because you should get the best people you can, just know you may have a smaller pool of outstanding directors in the female camp purely because of scale. If you don't care about gender & just want the very best director you can find, going solely by skills and experience, go for it. Either way you'll be ok. But if you go by a quota, well someone's getting the job because of their gender and someone is missing out because of their gender and skillset aside, you put gender first.

What Society has to determine is, what is gender because to some there's 200+ genders to some there's an infinite number of genders and to many of us there's just male, female and in 1.7% of the population intersex.

Now if you chase gender diversity how do you manage with 200+ or infinite number of genders?

How do you manage with male, female, transmale, transfemale or those who have physical attributes of one gender but "identify" wholly as the other traditional gender? Now if we're talking the workplace of Professional Sport, do we abolish all gender sports and have all sports of mixed genders or do we have male & female sports or do we allow someone who was a man for 25 years, now a transwoman or gender reassigned woman compete in women's football, cage fighting, weight lifting?