Women on board can help avoid crisis
KUALA LUMPUR: If the Lehman brothers were the Lehman sisters, the West would not be in the mess it is in, said NAM Institute for the Empowerment of Women (NIEW) director Tan Sri Dr Rafiah Salim.
She was speaking at a panel discussion on the merits of gender diversity in the boardroom organised by CSR Asia.
The lack of female participation in boards, she said, had led to the implementation of the policy that required companies to have a minimum 30% of women as board members.
“I want to emphasise that when this was first announced, I was thoroughly verbally abused on TV, radio, everywhere. But it is a target, not a legislation.
“We’re not saying ‘appoint Malaysian women’ just because they wear skirts – no way. It is because they have the ability and capability to do it.
“We could have followed the Norway system whereby you have to have 40% of women on the board or you will be delisted. But we believe our corporate sector is mature enough to not need legislation.
“We are going for persuasion, but we are not just going to hope and pray for it to happen. We sat and talked to various parties. All this because we wanted the private sector to move on its own steam rather than legislate,” she said.
Fellow panelist and Minority Shareholders Watchdog Group chief executive officer Rita Benoy Bushon said she was skeptical at first about the quota because it could have resulted in tokenism and impacted the quality of a board’s decision-making, but she was now convinced that the policy was necessary.
“We know the labour force is full of women, but we also want to have their ‘brainforce’ at the board level,” she said.
Rafiah cited a study conducted by the Cranfield school of management on gender diversity in Asia which found that Malaysian companies came out on top in terms of their equality at the junior, middle and senior levels, but this did not extend to the CEO and non-executive board level.
“So what are the men doing? Are women good enough to do the hard work, to break our backs, but not good enough to get to the top because we don’t play golf with you? Or because we don’t go to clubs with you or to the same old boy’s association?”
“When I ask some of the captains in town why they are not appointing women, they say, ‘Where are they?’ But if you keep looking at the golf course, of course you can’t find them,” Rafiah exclaimed.
She added that NIEW was currently working on a framework to create board-ready women candidates.
“We are identifying capable women who will be trained via an onboarding programme paid for by the Federal Government. The first group has gone through (the training) already. By the end of the year, we will have 250 women ready,” she said.
Source : The Star
Date : 15 March 2012
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