More women in the boardroom? Never mind the equality, watch the performance
Successful businesswomen may scoff at the proposal of quotas for women in boardrooms — and many men will dismiss it as Euro-correctness gone mad (see Matthew Lynn, page 17). But I suggest that anyone who hopes to collect a private pension should welcome the idea, for purely selfish reasons.
A report by former trade minister Lord Davies of Abersoch this week was expected to call for ‘voluntary targets’ to bring the proportion of women directors of FTSE 350 companies up to one in four by 2015, compared to current ratios of one in eight for the top hundred companies and one in 13 for the next 250. The word is that if voluntary action doesn’t break the glass ceiling for the ladies, statutory quotas could follow.
This means upwards of 600 new senior posts for women over the next four years – matched by 600 middle-aged chaps on the career scrapheap. But male chauvinists who think Davies must have been brainwashed by Harriet Harman and secret agents from Brussels should consider the numerous surveys conducted in recent years that show women to be consistently more successful portfolio investors than men.
Women are more risk-averse, less driven by raw competitive urges, and more likely to stay focused on generating steady returns; and those are precisely the qualities needed in non-executive directors to counterbalance the machismo of thrusting executives. Imagine a Royal Bank of Scotland board made up of the philosopher Baroness Warnock, Dame Maggie Smith in Downton mode, the contrarian investment writer Merryn Somerset Webb, and your own mother-in-law (or indeed, imagine your own female dream team for this purpose and email it to martin@spectator.co.uk).
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