Lai See | Numbers don't stack up for 30% Club's boardroom goals
The great and the good of Hong Kong society gathered at the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre to hear Mervyn Davies, Lord Davies of Abersoch, talk about the 21st Century Boardroom. But the real reason was to continue the 30% Club's assault on the corporate boardrooms which have long been a bastion confined largely to males.
The 30% Club is an outreach arm of The Women's Foundation, which specifically aims to increase the number of women on corporate boards. Lord Davies is something of a poster boy for the movement, given his close personal links to Hong Kong having been CEO of Standard Chartered Bank for a number of years, before subsequently becoming chairman. But he is also embraced by the organisation for the groundbreaking Davies Report, which focused attention on women in the boardroom when it was published in Britain in 2011. The aim of the club is to increase the number of women on corporate boards to at least 30 per cent. The task is a big one. At present women make up just 10.7 per cent of directors of Hong Kong-listed companies, while some 40 per cent of companies listed in Hong Kong have no women on their boards.
Maybe it was just lunchtime rhetoric but Davies said he found it "inconceivable" that Hong Kong was not leading the way on women's issues. Choosing his words carefully, he said: "I would say a lot of boards here have been groups of friends and groups of people that have known each other. And that was fine in the old days. But in today's world it's not fine." We are going through a phase in the world where women have more influence in the world generally, in politics, in buying, and consumer behaviour. "If you have a group of individuals that have the same skills, then you will not have a good board."
It was left to shareholder activist David Webb to make the point, albeit indirectly, that actions spoke louder than fine words, lunches and glossy reports. "When you left the board in 2009, 2 out of the 13 directors were women, and today 2 out of 21 are women so the percentages are going down. Can Standard Chartered not find suitable women to sit on its board?" Davies replied that women comprised 25 per cent of the non-executives on his board, which we believe sidestepped the issue somewhat.
Curiously, given his close involvement with the 30% Club, Davies admitted that after 34 years of marriage, "I do accept I will never understand women."
