Women absent from many boardrooms

A leading group of international businesswomen called on the world's 200 biggest male-dominated companies to step up efforts to give women more leadership roles in large corporations.

Although the number of women on corporate boards in Fortune Global 200 companies increased from 285 to 308 since 2004, men still hold the lion's share of board seats, with nearly 89 percent, a report issued by Corporate Women Directors International (CWDI) showed.

Little progress has been made to ensure boardroom equality of the sexes, the report, which followed up on a similar study conducted in 2004, lamented.

"If over 80 percent of buying decisions are being made by women, why wouldn't you have them represented in your company?" CWDI chairwoman Irene Natividad said.

The eight countries with the largest cluster of 2006 Fortune Global 200 companies - the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy - have all made progress in appointing women directors since 2004, the report said.

"However, the majority of the largest companies in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Venezuela, Russia and China, for instance, still do not have women directors," it said.

Japan, the second biggest economy in the world, lagged far behind the United States, whose companies led the list of those empowering women executives.

In the 27 Japanese companies on the Fortune listing, only five board members out of 389 were women, making for a meager 1.3 percent.

In the US, women account for 166 of the 941 board members in firms on the Fortune Global 200 listing, or 17.6 percent.

"Of the 75 American companies within the Fortune Global 200, only one doesn't have a female director," Natividad said.

"What's more important is that 75 percent of these US companies have two or more women. That's key. They have gone beyond the token woman."

France, which ranked joint third with Germany on the Fortune listing, with 19 companies each, counted 22 women board members out of a total of 288, or a paltry 7.6 percent.

And often, women have only token representation on French boards.

In Germany, women held 10.9 percent of board seats, but the vast majority were on the less powerful supervisory board, not the decision-making management board of a company.

Italian companies on the Fortune list brought up the rear in Europe, with women making up just 2.9 percent of corporate boards and not even figuring on the boards of three of the five firms that made it into the rankings.

No women

Forty-five companies in the Fortune Global 200, including the Texas-based Plains All-American Pipeline, Germany's Daimler and a raft of Japanese household-name firms, have no women directors, the report shows.

"I have never said women are perfect creatures, but they do bring in a perspective that is very necessary to be competitive in the global economy," Natividad said, urging the world's large companies to do more to empower women.

AFP

(China Daily 09/25/2007 page16)