Women on top in business

By JULIE MIDDLETON

"Being a director is like being a member of the most loyal supporters' club. We don't play the game but we have to be in the stands, watching and encouraging and noticing things that are going wrong.

"You need to be the sort of person that can look down from the stand, someone who has the ability to be strategic."

The speaker is Rosanne Meo, Remuera mother of two, possessor of an arts degree and businesswoman with a marketing and general management background. She is also a non-executive director - as in, not a staff member - of some of the most high-powered companies in the land.

Once upon a time, in a more benign economic climate, the people in the stands she's talking about were all men.

And yes, the old boys' back-scratching network still exists, says Meo. But in an uncertain economic environment where there is little room for error, getting the right skills starts taking precedence over informal networks.

And we do know that women have those skills. Research in 2001 by management school Cranfield, in Britain, found that of the top 100 listed companies on the London Stock Exchange, 85 per cent had female directors.

Most top-performing United States companies have at least one woman board member. Indeed, those companies without women directors were clustered in the lower ranks of the Fortune 500.

In New Zealand, women make up just 17.4 per cent of directors, according to the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust.

But in Crown companies, 34 per cent of board members are women: that's a 15 per cent increase since 1997, and evidence of the effort the Government has been making to ensure equal access for women.

Not least among the reasons why women board members are so valuable is that they help to provide a better balance of viewpoints.

"You should be recruiting directors from the widest possible talent pool, exactly as you would with any position in any organisation," says Trudie McNaughton, executive director of the EEO Trust. "Most organisations recruit too narrowly, whether intentionally or otherwise."

But setting out to get a woman on board specifically for her gender, rather than her skills and knowledge, is not the answer.

Meo's first board position was with the then state-owned Forestry Corporation. She is a past director of Sky Television and chairperson of Television New Zealand. But she turned down several offers when she realised they were aimed more at getting female bums on seats, rather than appointing on merit: "I will not be a party to tokenism."

So what sorts of skills and knowledge are boards after?

There are no minimum barriers to entry - but conversely, say both Meo and professional director Joan Withers, completing the Institute of Directors' introductory courses in directing by no means makes one fully fledged.

"Boards look for complementary skill sets," says Withers, who transformed herself from a jersey-knitting housewife to a major business player, then left the top job at The Radio Network to devote more time to her own interests.

Traditionally, boards have been heavy with number-crunchers and lawyers. But now, while everyone still needs to be financially literate - and among the courses the institute provides are several covering finances - Withers says boards are increasingly seeking people with marketing and sales backgrounds.

The most important attributes, she says, are "honesty and integrity. That has to be a given".

Adds INL director Sandra Moran: "There must be a lot of female talent out there which is able to do the job. It's a matter of putting yourself forward."

So what are the best ways for women to make their interest known?

To begin with, keep up your networking, and keep an eye on the papers - more directorships are advertised these days as companies succumb to pressure to be more accountable and transparent and try to expand their talent pool. Institute of Directors chief executive David Newman recommends voluntary organisations as a good way to become known.

Two official channels are also worth trying: the institute itself and the board nominations services the Government runs for its agencies.

The Ministry of Women's Affairs is one of three Government bodies that run under-publicised nominations services for people who want to contribute to one of New Zealand's 500-plus statutory boards. (The others are Te Puni Kokiri and the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs.)

These boards range from from those governing state-owned enterprises such as New Zealand Post to advisory boards such as the Legal Aid Review Committee of the Abortion Supervisory Committee. And the Ministry of Women's Affairs' stated aim is to ensure that by 2010, half their members are women.

The three services funnel information to the Treasury-owned Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit (CCMAU), which oversees government-owned agencies and their board appointments.

The Ministry of Women's Affairs also publishes the online guide Women on Board - a plain-language guide to the workings of Government boards and committees. It covers everything from boards' critical roles and the legislation affecting them to how much time members need to be effective directors.

A ministry spokesperson says that its database, set up in 1986, now contains the details of 950 women with skills and experience ranging from librarians to mathematicians and lawyers. In the year to June 30, 27 appointments were made from the database to boards, including seven of the nine Crown Research Institute boards.

The 3000-strong Institute of Directors also runs a board appointment service to link directors and companies. It has 800 screened CVs recorded, says Wray Wilson, the institute's professional development manager, and you don't have to be a member to use it.

Available for eight years, the service has recently been revamped "to give a bit more rigour", he says. He's unsure of how many of those CVs belong to women, but suggests it's probably about about the same proportion as the institute's female membership: 22 per cent.

But echoing McNaughton's comments, Newman says boards are simply not managing the search for board members as thoroughly as they would a senior executive. He doesn't think it's "wilful discrimination", rather, he says, they don't understand the benefits of casting the net wider.

They should assess those women who perhaps become frustrated with the slog up the corporate ladder, he says, and have set up their own businesses.

"We have to drag them out. They've got the same and probably better experience than those coming through the larger companies.

"It all comes back to what skills the board is looking for. And there's no reason why most skills are not found in competent women."

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