Monday, April 03, 2006

Unwarranted whinging

According to Stuff a new study released by the Human Rights Commission shows there are still too few women in leadership jobs.

Equal Employment Opportunity commissioner Judy McGregor said she "surprised and incredibly disappointed. . .the results show dismal progress".

The survey showed:

A total of 63 of the top 100 New Zealand companies had no women on their boards (46 women out of 645 directors), compared with the total workforce being 47 per cent women.


But women only make up 37.5 percent of the full-time workforce.

Full-time Part-time
Men 1,025,400 (90%) 113,800 (11%)
Women 617,400 (64%) 349,000 (36%)
Total 1,642,800 462,800
Overall % 78% 22%

"I'm not hard on it having to be 50-50, but I would ask why is half of New Zealand's potential ignored in terms of governance?"

Well clearly half of NZ's potential is not being ignored. 37 of 100 New Zealand companies had women on their boards and 32.2 per cent of Members of Parliament are women. Given thousands of women take time out of the workforce to raise families I would have thought these figures looked pretty good (if you care about gender representation anyway.)

4 comments:

Rebel Heart said...

bloody hell who gives a fuck aye

Rebel Heart said...

(referring to the report, not your blog post)

Anonymous said...

Equal Employment Opportunity Commissar Judy McGregor - I suppose she has to turn out some useless report from time to time to safeguard her place at the public trough

Craig Ranapia said...

Well, Fairfax CEO Joan Withers made a rather good point on National Radio's The Panel yesterday afternoon (the audio is up on the RNZ website) - let's just say she basically thinks Judy McGregor doesn't know what she's talking about.

1) That many women just don't have the high level of senior management experience to foot it at board level, but it's a matter of time.

2) In her experience, boards bend over backwards to find qualified women.

3) She also notes that women in senior management, for a variety of reasons, just aren't that obsessed with making the transition to corporate governance. After all, it's a bit more complex - and time-consuming - that trying to stay awake until you can bugger off for a long liquid lunch on the expenses.