‘Women on Boards’ is helping British and Australian organisations promote more women to fill seats in their boardrooms. 

A report in the UK Guardian newspaper

Female athletes won 38% of Australia’s medal tally at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. The same year, two professional women sat down to discuss why there were so few women on sport and business boards and what could be done. This was the genesis of Women on Boards, an enterprise created to improve the gender balance in Australian boardrooms.

Fast-forward to 2012, the London Olympics is over, women took home more than a third of the medals won by Team GB, and Women on Boards, having helped 1,000 Australian women achieve board roles, is rolling out across the UK. 

Britain favours a voluntary approach to achieving gender diversity in the boardroom, rather than the mandatory quota system that has increased female representation on boards in Norway from less than 10% in 2003 to more than 40%.

Australia is ahead of the UK in the number of women on the boards of publicly listed companies. It introduced gender diversity provisions into its corporate governance code several years ahead of the UK, and Women on Boards and other groups have been pushing hard on the issue.

The proportion of women on the boards of Australia’s 200 largest publicly listed companies has increased from 8.3% in January 2010 to 14.6% in September 2012. However, there is a sense that appointment rates may be slowing. For the first eight months of this year, 24% of new appointments to the boards of ASX 200 companies were women, compared with 28% in 2011.

In the UK, the percentage of women on the boards of the 100 largest companies has risen over the past year to a record 15.6%. And in the last six months, 35% of new board appointments to FTSE 250 companies have been women. Read it here