KEY POINTS:
The number of Australian women being appointed to directorships on the ASX 200 has plateaued and is possibly going backwards, according to the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick.
The percentage of female board directors in Australia is still languishing at 8.7 per cent, according to the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency's 2006 figures.
By comparison in New Zealand, the Equal Employment Opportunity Unit 2008 Census reports women represent 8.65 per cent of the directors on the stock exchange, and 60 of the top 100 NZSX companies still have no female directors.
Crown companies are approaching gender parity, however, with 34 per cent of boards having female board members last year.
Meanwhile, female chief executive officers in Australia typically earn two-thirds of what their male counterparts do, and will start their careers below men too, according to Peter McGraw, head of the Labour Management Studies Foundation at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Despite these low figures, Coca-Cola Amatil chairman, David Gonski, well-known to be amenable to female board members, rules out the idea of putting in quotas to legislate equality as a solution.
Corporate leaders of the ASX 200 should, however, be setting targets, he said at Australia's first National Diversity on Boards conference in Sydney, hosted by Women on Boards (WOB), a networking organisation of 5200 women - many of whom are directors and aspiring directors.
Gonski says: "I believe there should be targets and we should get on with it." Quotas were not working well in places such as Germany, where various interest groups, such as union members, were allowed on boards. "It disadvantages business."
In Norway, 40 per cent of all boards must be women, and women have up to 35 directorships each.
Two high-flying female directors made appearances at the conference, Catherine Brenner and Yasmin Allen, both of whom made climbing the corporate ladder look easy.
They have investment banking backgrounds - Brenner was formerly the managing director of ABN Amro Rothschild, while Allen used to be the vice-president of Deutsche Bank in Sydney.
Allen left Deutsche with a view to becoming a director and now has a handful of non-executive directorships, including a non-executive directorship at IAG.
"My background is advising institutional shareholders," says Allen. "I understand what shareholders want - being long-term and 'value-add' driven. It's about skills, anyone needs to feel comfortable with your skills. They don't want some maverick."
A Coca-Cola Amatil non-executive board director, Catherine Brenner, urged the conference's audience to resign itself to the fact the majority of corporate decision-makers were men and to seek influential male mentors, as she had done with Centennial Coal chairman Ken Moss.
A few years after this mentoring relationship, he offered her a board directorship on Centennial.
Brenner has five directorships and would like another two. "You need to have champions who will proactively recommend you, or who will speak positively if approached.
"We must act as leaders and as role models for women and, please, do not be a ladder puller.
"Play to your strengths and take charge of your own development. You must look for these opportunities and grasp them with both hands.
"The blokes do it as second nature, we need to be more proactive."
Awareness of the need for more diversity on boards is growing among Australian corporates, says Brenner.
John Meacock, managing partner of Deloitte New South Wales, said boards were facing a watershed in Australia where the role and make-up of boards was increasingly in question.
In a Deloitte survey of the attitudes of 100-plus ASX 200 directors called "Board effectiveness: The Directors' Cut", it found there was concern about the mix of skills on boards.
"A number of directors felt there was a need to be more adventurous in the composition of boards to gain a diversity of gender, age and ethnicity to represent the markets in which they operate," says Meacock. The issue was becoming increasingly important as Australian boards went global.
Massey PhD student and New Zealand business woman, Rosanne Hawarden, gave the Australian audience a blighting picture of New Zealand as an environment which failed to support talented women executives.
At best, New Zealand's approach to affirmative action could be called "patchy and informal" but was achieving some admirable successes in the state sector, while Government exhortations were falling on deaf ears in the corporate sector, she said.
There was a paucity of women serving as inside directors despite rising female appointments at chief executive and chief finance and operating officer level, Hawarden says in her paper, "New Zealand woman directors: many aspire but few succeed". And while there was a sprinkling of female directors in New Zealand, some acted like queen bees.
"These women tend not to be proactive in recommending other women for board appointments or mentoring aspiring women," says Hawarden. "The prevailing attitude is that their success was achieved through their own merit, and others should be capable of similar success without extra assistance.
"Gender parity may need the stronger medicine of legislated quotas as is happening in other countries.
"Would a Women On Boards organisation work in New Zealand? I think you need a face."
WOB's public face is chairwoman Ruth Medd, who has the ear of many powerful business leaders in Australia.
The organisation works with emerging female talent at Qantas among others to help find them directorships on a variety of boards.
The percentage of WOB members taking up positions on boards has increased from 35 per cent in 2006 to 42 per cent this year, says Medd.
New Zealand's Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner, Judy McGregor says the initiative would have to come from business for such a body, a business school for instance.
Meanwhile, responding to Gonski's comments against quotas, she says that targets were all very well but asked who was going to set those targets and be responsible for them?
With New Zealand and Australia's senior women trying to find the "circuit breaker" which will open the directorship market to them, McGregor has concluded legislating for gender equality could be the only way forward in New Zealand, which would be politically popular.
"The bleakness of the prognosis almost pushes me to [suggest] the Norway solution," she says. "We know all the problems... it's not that the corporate industry does not know."
