Gender BalanceThis section will feature factual information relating to Gender Balance on a global scale. The issues of equality and parity for women is an issue that deserves attention and rational debate if women are to be valued as equal players in all spheres of society. How far have women come and are women satisfied with the advances that have been made over the years, are some of the unstated questions in this Section. Access Australian Gender Data onlineNew ABS ‘Gender @ a Glance’ topic pageSPEECHES
Address to the Soroptimists Club INTERVIEWS(2006) Interview with Dr Shirley Randell AM Senior Adviser Governance/Gender, East and South Africa Region, SNV Organisation RESEARCH
FACTS, FIGURES, NEWS:
Articles related to Gender Issues
2004
EOWA
AUSTRALIAN CENSUS OF
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Census
FACTS about Women Executive Managers |
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For
the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange at |
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Women
hold 10.2% of Executive Management positions (compared with 8.8% in
2003)
42.0%
of companies have no women executive managers
Women
hold just 6.5% of all line positions identified
62.1%
of women occupy support positions as opposed to line positions that
ultimately lead to CEO or Board appointments, (compared with 31.4% of
men in support positions)
37.9%
of women executive managers are in line positions compared with 68.6% of
men |
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Best
Performing Industries ·
Software
& Services ·
Retailing ·
Healthcare
Equipment & Services ·
Banks ·
Diversified
Financials |
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Worst
Performing Industries ·
Consumer
Durables & Apparel ·
Hotels,
Restaurants & Leisure ·
Food,
Beverage & Tobacco ·
Capital
Goods ·
Automobiles
& Components |
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‘What
Gets Measured Gets Managed’
An
international comparison of the % of women executive managers: |
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COUNTRY |
Latest
CENSUS FIGURES |
2nd CENSUS |
1st CENSUS |
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10.2%
(2004) |
8.8%
(2003) |
8.4%
(2002) |
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15.7%
(2002) |
10.0%
(1996) |
8.7%
(1995) |
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14.0%
(2002) |
12.0%
(1999) |
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14.7%
(2004) |
— |
See
latest |
Women Under-represented in International Economic Policy-Making
Women make up only 2.2% of the Board of Governors at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and only 5.5% at the World Bank, according to a study conducted by the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). On the Board of Directors of these two institutions, women comprised only 8.3% of the Directors at IMF and 0% at the World Bank. The Board of Governors at both institutions is made up of senior economic government officials, such as Ministers of Finance and Central Bank heads, while the Board of Directors is the chief decision-making body within each of the IMF and World Bank.. These findings show that despite the Beijing +5 Platform for Action in which world governments pledged to include a gender perspective in all economic policies and development programs, women's voices are still largely excluded from the leadership of influential multilateral financial organizations.
At the country level, the situation is not any better. Worldwide, there are only 28 female ministers holding economy-related portfolios, such as Finance, Economics, Trade, Development, Industry, and Agriculture.
Source: Global Women's Business Network
Political Participation
Out of over 180 countries, only 11 are currently headed by women:
- Madior Boye, Prime Minister of Senegal
- Helen Clark, Prime Minister of New Zealand
- Tarja Halonen, President of Finland
- Chandrika Kumaratunga, President of Sri Lanka
- Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, President of the Philippines
- Mary McAleese, President of Ireland
- Mireya Moscoso, President of Panama
- Jennifer Smith, Premier of Bermuda
- Megawati Sukarnoputri, President of Indonesia
- Vaira Vike-Freiberga, President of Latvia
- Khaleda Zia, Prime Minister of Bangladesh
- In 1893, New Zealand became the first nation to grant women full voting
rights.
-
Among the countries in the developing world that were the earliest to
grant women the right to vote were:
- Finland (1906)
- Albania (1920)
- Mongolia (1924)
- Ecuador (1929)
- Turkey (1930)
- Sri Lanka (1931)
Some of the latest countries to grant women suffrage are:- Switzerland (1971)
- Iraq (1980)
- Namibia (1989)
- Kazakhstan (1994)
- In the 21st century, some countries still do not have universal suffrage. Among them are Brunei Darussalam, Kuwait, Sultanate of Oman, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
- * At the beginning of this century few countries had universal suffrage for men, let alone women. The USA, Germany, Britain and the Nordic countries gave women the vote in the 1920’s, but France and Italy waited until 1944 and 1945 respectively, Greece 1952 and Portugal, not until 1976!!!! Even in politics women are given the “soft” portfolios, such as health, education, social affairs and culture, rarely are they given foreign affairs, finance and justice - these invariably go to men. Finland is the only country where at some point every single portfolio has been held by a woman.
Source: Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP)
*Source:
Extracts from
Women at Work: The
Next Decade
Economic Decision-Making
- Women's participation in higher levels of economic decision-making remains minuscule, even in the West.
- Only 1% of the world's assets are in the name of women.
- Men in the Arab states have 3.5 times the purchasing power of their female counterparts.
- 70% of people in abject poverty-- living on less than $1 per day-- are women.
- Women around the world continue to be significantly under-represented in the higher paid, higher prestige sectors of the workforce.
Among the developed countries, in France only 9% of the workforce and in the Netherlands 20% of the workforce are female administrators and managers.
Among the developing countries, in Ecuador and the Bahamas, 33% of the workforce is comprised of women administrators and managers.
-
Women's participation in managerial and administrative posts is around 33% in the developed world, l5% in Africa, and 13% in Asia and the Pacific. In Africa and Asia-Pacific these percentages, small as they are, reflect a doubling of numbers in the last twenty years.
-
In the United States, more than one-third of all women-headed households
fall below the poverty line.
-
There are only 5 women chief executives in the Fortune 500 corporations,
the most valuable publicly owned companies in the United States. These
include the CEOs of Xerox, Spherion, Hewlett-Packard, Golden West Financial,
and Avon Products.
- In Silicon Valley, for every 100 shares of stock options owned by a man, only one share is owned by a woman.
-
* Women make 85% of overall staff, 60% of middle managers, 30% of senior managers, but still has only ONE female executive director. An annual survey of Fortune 500 companies in the USA by Catalyst, a New York-based research organisation, found that women only occupy 3% of CEO, President and Chairman positions. Immediately on the brighter side though: 83% of the Fortune 500 now have at least one women on the board, and 30% of them two or more. As you might expect, women directors are more likely to be found in industries such as cosmetics, food services, airlines and computer software, rather than say engineering or construction.
Source: Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP)
*
Source:
Extracts from
Women at Work: The
Next Decade
Education
- 855,000,000 people in the world are illiterate. 70% of them are female.
- Two-thirds of the world's children who receive less than four years of education are girls.
- For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20%, child deaths drop 10%, and wages rise 20%; yet, international aid dedicated to education is declining.
- Worldwide, more than half the population of women over age 15 cannot read or write.
- Girls represent nearly 60% of the children not in school.
- Even when women have equal years of education, it does not translate into economic opportunities or political power.
- While women in Nigeria enjoy 53% literacy, in Morocco 34%, and in Palestine 77%, their participation in politics and the economy lag far behind.
Source: Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP)
Health and Family
- Worldwide, women suffer greater malnutrition than men.
- 600,000 women -- one every minute -- die each year from pregnancy-related causes. Most of these deaths are preventable.
- As children, girls are often undervalued, fed less, and given inadequate healthcare.
- Parents in countries such as China and India sometimes use sex determination tests to find out if their fetus is a girl. Of 8000 fetuses aborted at a Bombay clinic, 7999 were female.
- In the Global South, women traditionally eat last and least. They do not get more to eat even during pregnancy and nursing.
- Nearly half of all people living with HIV/AIDS are women and girls.
- 510,000 children under the age of 15 died of HIV/AIDS in 1998. Today, almost 1.2 million children under the age of 15 are living with HIV/AIDS.
- In some countries, the HIV/AIDS infection rates for 15- to 19-year old girls are 3 to 6 times higher than for boys.
- Every day 7000 young persons are infected with HIV/AIDS.
Source: Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP)
Work
- Worldwide, women's work in the home is not counted as work.
- 90% of the rural female labor force are called "housewives" and excluded from the formal definition of economic activity.
- Women work-- on average and across the world-- more hours than men each week, sometimes as much as 35 hours more, but their work is often unpaid and unaccounted for.
- Where women do the same work as men, they are paid 30 to 40 percent less than men. Women all over the world, on average are paid less than men - typically 20-30% less for similar kinds of work. (Avril Henry)
- There is no country in the world where women's wages are equal to those of men.
- In the U.K., Italy, Germany, and France women are paid 75% of men's wages, whereas in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Australia women earn 90% of men's wages.
- Women produce nearly 80% of the food on the planet, but receive less than 10% of agricultural assistance.
- In most places in the world, work is segregated by sex. Women tend to be in clerical, sales and domestic services, and men in manufacturing and transport.
- Women occupy only 2% of senior management positions in business.
-
Women's participation in managerial and administrative posts is around 33%
in the developed world, l5% in Africa, and 13% in Asia and the Pacific. In
Africa and Asia-Pacific these percentages, small as they are, reflect a
doubling of numbers in the last twenty years.
Source: Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP)
A Summary of the Status of Women in Australia - over the last 25 years
Just
25 years ago, only 40% of married women were in the paid workforce compared with
52% in the late 90s. Up until the
early 1970’s, financial reasons were the main reasons women worked. However, as women wanted more independence and freedom, work
was seen as a path to achieve this, and hence, women began working for the
fulfilment of a career as well as the economic benefit, which is reflected in
current statistics.
The
concept of equal pay for equal work was novel, having only been legislated a few
years before (but in some industries is still not a reality in the 90’s), and
the idea of comparable worth would have been laughable.
So women were segregated into a small number of occupations and on the
whole, earning less than males. In
some industries, such as banking and teaching, women were still forced to resign
when they got married, with the justification that doing this meant more jobs
for young people.
Child
care places were few and far between 25 years ago.
Women who worked full time had to wait until their children were at
school before going back to work, or rely on family and neighbours
to care for them. Not only did women have to deal with their jobs and the home, but also
with the disapproval of their family and friends.
A 1960 Gallup poll found that 78% of people believed that married women
with children should stay home full-time, only 18% believed a married woman
should be “allowed” to work. In
1972, 82% of women with dependent children under the age of 14 stayed home
full-time, by 1992 this figure had dropped to 31%, and by the late 1990s, only
26% of women with children under the age of 14 stayed home full-time.
In fact, by the early to mid 1990's, 59% of two-parent families had both
parents working full-time.
These statistics alone indicate that there has been a change in attitude over the last 20 - 30 years, but while the situation for women is quite different to what it was, many issues still remain. Support networks for women are declining with globalisation, increasing mobility in the work place and changes in family structures. Today 30 % of first time marriages, and 40% of second marriages result in divorce, increasing the number of single parent families, most of which are headed up by women, 69% of whom work full-time. Approximately 43% of full-time jobs, and 75% of part-time jobs are occupied by women. This means that child care is a more critical issue today than it was 20 years ago... As at the end of the 1990's, only 6% of Australian companies provided child care. In the late 80’s and 90’s organisations started introducing flexible work practices such as job sharing, home based work and part-time work which allow women to better combine work and family.
However, despite the advances of the last two to three decades...Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows that women still do more than double the amount of housework that their male partners do. This is not unique to Australia, men everywhere still do less than their fair share of housework and child care, even if their wives work full-time.
Recent statistics reveal that in corporate Australia, women now make up 8% of senior executive positions, 15% of senior managerial positions, 24% of middle managers, and 35% of junior managers. However, they occupy less than 3% of board positions.
Women in federal government in Australia hold approximately 30% of senate
positions, and women in NSW government hold 33% of Legislative Council
positions.
Many
women will continue to bang their heads against the glass or mahogany
ceiling, but more and more of them are deciding that their heads would be
better employed on something more constructive such as establishing their
own businesses. Interestingly, approximately 40% of the over 800,000 small businesses in
Australia are owned and operated by women, many of whom are from a Non English
speaking background, who have a higher success rate than men in small business.
Compared with the rigidity of corporate life, the flexibility of
self-employment seems to offer a solution to many working women’s greatest
problem: reconciling career and family.
In
the first decade of this century, some 20 % of women will choose to have no
children, and a further 20% will have only one child, but this will not diminish
their family responsibilities. Australia
has an aging population, with more than 47% of the population over the age of 45
by 2005. This will require greater
focus on elder care responsibilities. Women
will continue to be better educated at the secondary, tertiary and post graduate
level, and increasingly statistics are revealing more girls completing high
school than boys; nearly 50% of many tertiary qualified graduates are women, and
up to 30% of all MBA graduates.
Source:
Extracts from
Women at Work: The
Next Decade
Australian Bureau of Statistics, October 2002
Working Women
- There were 4,150,800 employed women.
- The labour force participation rate of all women (15 years and over) was 55.4 per cent.
- Women's unemployment rate was 5.9 per cent.
-
Female employment grew by 106,200 (2.6 per cent) between October 2001 and
October 2002:
- Women's full-time employment grew by 27,700 (1.2 per cent)
- Women's part-time employment grew by 78,400 (4.3 per cent)
Women's Pay
- Women's seasonally adjusted adult full-time average weekly ordinary time earnings in August 2002 were 85.1 per cent of men's. Women's average weekly full-time adult total earnings (which includes overtime) were 81.7 per cent of men's.
Superannuation
- In 2000, 97.8 per cent of women employees aged 15-69 who had leave entitlements and were not working on a fixed-term contract had some superannuation (the same as for men).
- Of all women jobholders (which includes casual workers and managers of incorporated and unincorporated enterprises but excludes contributing family workers and workers who worked for payment in kind only in their main job), 85.7 per cent had some superannuation (compared with 88.1 per cent of men).
Women's Education
- 41,232 women started post-graduate studies, 50.5 per cent of postgraduate commencements.
- 114,880 women started Bachelor degrees, 57.6 per cent of undergraduate commencements.
- There were 114,400 women apprentices and trainees in training at December 2001.
- The apparent retention rate to Year 12 was 79.1 per cent for girls compared with 68.1 per cent for boys.
Women in Leadership
- Women hold over 33 per cent of Australian Government Board positions under total Australian Government control ( Appoint , June 2003).
Women of Achievement
- 198 or 35.8 per cent of the 2004 Australia Day Honours were received by women.
Women's Health
- Life expectancy for women is high. Between 1977 and 1999, female life expectancy increased from 76.9 to 82 years.
- By 2021, one in 10 Australians is predicted to be a woman aged 65 and over. The majority of older women in the future can look forward to a relatively healthy and active old age.
- Australia's life expectancy for females is similar to Hong Kong, Sweden, France and Spain (each 82 years), and is above that of the United Kingdom, New Zealand (each 80 years) and the United States of America (79 years).
- Data from Victoria show the age standardised death rate from cervical cancer was more than halved from 6.3 per 100,000 in 1963 to 2.4 per 100,000 in 1993, indicating a clear benefit from cervical screening.
- The national breast screening programme is screening 54 per cent of women in the 50-69 years (the programme aims to achieve a participation rate of 70 per cent for this age group).
Fertility
- In 2001 Australia's estimated total fertility rate was the lowest on record at 1.73 babies per woman, compared to 1.75 in 2000.
- There were 246,400 births registered in Australia during 2001, a decrease of one per cent compared to 2000.
- Australia's fertility rate remains lower than that of New Zealand (2.0) and the United States of America (1.9) and higher than Canada (1.6), Japan (1.3) and many European countries such as Italy and Greece (each 1.2).
- The median age of mothers (that is where half of the mothers were younger and half were older) in 2001 was 30 years, compared to 26.6 years in 1980. The median age of known fathers (fathers whose details are given on the birth registration form) was 32.3 years.
- If current rates continue, 24 per cent of Australian women would remain childless at the end of their reproductive life.
Population
- At June 2000, 23 per cent of women living in Australia were born overseas.
- At August 2001, indigenous women made up 2 per cent of Australia's female population.
- In 1996, 13 per cent of Australia's women lived in rural areas.
Women in Politics
-
As at 16 October 2003, there were 60 women in the Commonwealth Parliament. 22 in the Senate (Upper House) and 38 in the House of Representatives (Lower House). This brings women's participation in the Commonwealth Parliament to 26.5% rising from 25.4% following the 1998 Federal election and 14% following the 1993 election. This rate is almost double the international average of 17.3%.
Women in Small Business
- In 2001, 33 per cent of Australia's small business operators were women.
Source: OSW Commonwealth
Women on the News in the US
A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican. Conducted for FAIR by the media analysis firm Media Tenor, the study "Power Sources," shows that ...Women made up only 15 percent of all sources (14 percent on ABC and CBS, and 18 percent on NBC), and were rarely featured as experts. Women were particularly poorly represented in the categories of professional and political sources, which were only 9 percent female. More than half of the women who appeared on the network news in 2001 were presented as ordinary Americans (as opposed to experts of some kind), versus 14 percent of male sources.
Source: Study: "Power Sources," appears in the June 2002 issue of FAIR's magazine www.fair.org
GENDER PAY GAP IN THE EU COUNTRIES
In its recently released report on Equal Opportunities for Women and Menin the European Union, the European Union singled out the pay gap – the difference in salary that woman receives compared to a man – as a priority issue. "Despite the existence of legal provisions, women still earn nearly 14% less than men....It is the most visible inequality in the European workplace," states the report.
Among the EU member states, Greece had the highest pay gap with women earning only 60% of men's salaries. France and Germany tied for first place with the gender pay gap at approximately at 86%. Among the "candidate countries" to the EU, Slovenian women brought in 85% of what men earn in their country thus ranking first, while the Czech Republic ranked last with a 75% pay gap between men and women. For purposes of comparison, American women earn 75 cents to every dollar that a man makes and remain clustered in low-paying clerical, sales and service jobs similar to their European counterparts.
Source: Globewomen.com
Economic and Leadership Progress Still Needed in USA
While women have made tremendous advancements in income, opportunities and
leadership, there is still much to be done.
Women Business Owners:
- 48% of women-owned businesses have less than $10,000 in revenue annually
- 87% of all women-owned businesses generate less than $100,000 in revenue annually
- Only 1.8% of women-owned businesses generated $1M or more in annual revenues (compared to 5.04% of all firms)
Career Women:
- 16% of women earn six-figure salaries
- 12.4% National average for number of women on the boards of Fortune 500 companies
Politics:
- Women held 13.6%, of the 535 seats in the 107th US Congress
- In 2002, 89 women (27.7%) held statewide elective executive offices across the country
- In 2002, women held 1,680, (22.6%), of the 7,424 state legislators in the United States
Source:U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce
Study - Gender Pay Gap Larger than Previously Believed
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By Madeline Baran 13 June 2004 When feminists protested for equal pay 40 years ago, they printed buttons that said simply, "59 Cents" -- the amount women earned for every dollar a male worker earned. Today, according to the US Census Bureau report, that figure is around 77 cents, and many feminist organizations continue to point to these figures as evidence of continuing sexism in the workplace. However, female workers’ economic situation may actually be much worse, according to a new report released by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), an organization that conducts research on issues "of critical importance to women." In the study of almost 3,000 men and women, IWPR found that women earned just 38 percent of what male workers earn. "This continues to be a persistent problem in America’s workplace," said Irasema Garza, director of the Women’s Rights department at the AFL-CIO affiliated union of AFSCME, and IWRP board member. "At this rate, it will take another 50 years before we can reach parity." The striking difference between the two figures highlights the complicated process of analyzing earnings data. The Census Bureau report only analyzed data from year-round, full-time workers, leaving out the majority of women -- who work part-time or take time off to care for their children. The Census Bureau also analyzed the data separately each year, instead of examining earnings gaps over a lengthier period. In contrast, the IWPR study tracked workers over a 15-year-period, and did not exclude part-time workers, or those who had gaps in their employment. The IWRP study, conducted by economists Stephen J. Rose and Heidi Hartmann, tracked the actual earnings histories of men and women from 1983 to 1998 in the prime work years between ages 26 and 59. "The 77 [cents] number has some meaning, but it’s not the meaning that you think it is," said Stephen J. Rose, co-author of the IWRP study. Collecting data over a long period of time is necessary to understand a work-force where only 25 percent of women work full-time, year-round, compared with 75 percent of men, Rose said."It’s like having hidden blinders," he said. According to Rose, researchers compare the top 25 percent of women to 75 percent of male workers. "There are a lot of hidden assumptions there," he comments. "Long-term conditions are what we should really care about." The different methodologies yielded dramatically different results. The Census Bureau report, analyzing only full-time, year-round workers, found that women earned $33,000 on average in 1999, compared to $50,000 for men. In contrast, the women workers in the IWRP study, analyzed over a 15-year-period, earned an average of just $18,239 a year in 1999 dollars, compared with $48,180 for men. In the IWRP study, only nine percent of women earned more than $50,000 per year, compared to 42 percent of men. Forty-five percent of women workers averaged $25,000 or less, compared to just eleven percent of men. Analyzing data over long periods of time allowed researchers to track workers through marriage, divorce, children, and widowhood. The study showed that fewer than half of women earned income in all 15 years but 85 percent of men did. About 30 percent of women did not work at all for four or more years, compared to only one out of every 27 men. Both studies indicated that a gender earnings gap exists across education levels and occupations. The IWRP report found that women with graduate degrees earned only slightly more than men with only a high school diploma. The gender earnings gap affects both high and low-paying occupations. According to the Census Bureau report, female physicians and surgeons earned a median of $88,000 a year, only 63 percent of the $140,000 male median. Male lawyers earned a median of $90,000; women lawyers earned $66,000. Male dishwashers earned $14,000, compared to $12,000 for women. Most of the occupations where men and women come close to an equal wage are unionized positions, like postal service clerk and telecommunications installer. In the past, conservatives have argued that women earn less because they make the decision to remain home with children, while their husbands earn more. However, only 50 percent of the women tracked in the IWRP study were married for the entire 15-year period. According to the report, about half of all women enter retirement alone -- either divorced, separated, widowed, or single -- and must provide for their households with only their earnings. The Census Bureau report states that the differences could be, in part, explained by "free choice," but the IWRP report questions how free such choices really are. "When women ‘choose’ to spend more time out of the labor market taking care of children than their husbands do, how much of that choice is constrained by lack of affordable, good quality alternative care, women’s lower pay, or inferior working conditions on the job, their expectations that they won’t be promoted anyway, or social norms in their kinship network, religious group, or community?" the report asked. "It's self-perpetuating," Rose said, pointing out that women are more likely to give up their jobs to take care of the children, since they earn less than their husbands. The trend affects the larger labor market, according to Rose, as women's need for part-time work creates a pool of workers easily exploited by employers, driving down wages in the process. Garza, who also served as director of the US Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau under the Clinton administration, believes that the problem is rooted in women’s lack of access to education and better-paying traditionally "male" jobs, and in the low number of women who belong to a union. "The reality is that if we continue to make assumptions like, ‘Oh, women can’t dig ditches,’ or, ‘They have a man to take care of them,’ we’ll never have parity," she said. Rose said he hopes the study will challenge people who believe the earnings gap is no longer significant. "It’s not going away," he said. "The genie is out of the bag. [Women] haven’t come as long of a way as some people would like to think." Source: The NewStandard is published by PeoplesNetWorks, a small, nonprofit collective in the United States. The NewStandard http://newstandardnews.net |
The Gender Gap Report 2005 by the World Economic Forum
Women's Empowerment: Measuring the Global Gender GapThe Gender Gap Report quantifies the size of the gender gap in 58 countries, including all 30 OECD countries and 28 other emerging markets. The study measures the extent to which women have achieved full equality with men in five critical areas:
- economic participation
- economic opportunity
- political empowerment
- educational attainment
- health and well-being
The annual Survey, conducted by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Programme, polled close to 9,000 business leaders in 104 economies worldwide in 2004. The survey questionnaire is designed to capture a broad range of factors central to creating a healthy business environment, including labour practices, the quality of the country’s educational system, its infrastructure and general level of institutional development.
The survey also provides rare information on issues such as childcare availability and cost, the impact of maternity laws on the hiring of women, the prevalence of private sector employment of women and wage inequality.
For a summary see: World Economic Forum Launches New “Gender Gap Index” Measuring Inequality between Women and Men in 58 Countries - 2005
Also included is an interview with Saadia Zahidi, Economist at the World Economic Forum and Co-author of the "Women's Empowerment: Measuring the Global Gender Gap."
Director 'gene pool' isn't getting bigger
THE stranglehold on top directorships appears to be tightening.Nearly two out of three people appointed as non-executive directors of ASX 100 companies in 2005 had come from the boardroom of a top 100 company, according to new research. That figure, at 61 per cent, is a massive jump on the 27 per cent of 2004. The appointments "from within" were occurring at a time of considerable "board renewal" at the top 100 companies, almost double the turnover from the year before. In 2005, there were 173 new non-executive director board seats, up from 93 in 2004. The research, commissioned by the Australian Council of Super Investors, also found a growing number of ASX 100 directors were holding multiple board seats.
In 2005, 117 non-executive directors held 269 board seats, or 42.8 per cent of all boardroom positions. Interestingly, the research, carried out by ISS Australia, found that female directors were more likely to hold many more board seats. Of the 57 women on the ASX 100 company boards, 35, or 61.7 per cent, held more than one board seat on a listed company. This compared with 40.9 per cent of males.
However, women continue to be under-represented in boardrooms of Australia's biggest companies, underscoring the lack of diversity in the directors' club. But the study shows that once a woman has broken through the glass ceiling, she is much more in demand. Women accounted for just 9.2 per cent of all directors on the boards of the top 100 in 2005, slightly down from the 9.3 per cent in 2004.
While the club is small, directors' fees increased again, and at a faster rate than in 2004. In 2005, the average non-executive director, excluding the chairman, received $154,165, up 7.1 per cent from 2004. This was an increase on the rate between 2003 and 2004, when non-executive director pay grew by 5.4 per cent. It was also well ahead of the consumer price index, which rose 2.5 per cent in 2004-05. On average, the ASX 100 chairman received a 6.6 per cent increase in pay to $363,576, a reduction on the 9.9 per cent average growth enjoyed the year before. ACSI executive director Phil Spathis said that while appointments from within might show boards were trying to stock up on experienced and talented directors, it could also indicate they were looking only within the club. "I am still not convinced companies are looking hard enough beyond that shrinking gene pool," Mr Spathis said. "You can find people with skills across a range of sectors, and people with the right values from both within the gene pool and outside the gene pool also."