Are foreign females really better than British women?
Women in boardrooms is usually seen as a sexist issues. It’s not; it’s about xenophobia. Selection committees are not anti-women but anti-British.
Some 14 women have been made directors of FTSE 100 company boards in the past year. Not exactly equality, but a big more towards it. Yet just one of those women is British. What’s wrong with our home-grown female executives?
It seems that when selection committees decide to show their liberal credentials by increasing the female contingent they decide to go the whole hog and increase the foreign quota too. They confuse the exotic with the exceptional. An overseas woman on the board allows box-tickers to squeeze two ticks into one square.
But this desire to recruit from abroad is not a female issue. As this blog has pointed out before, 42 of the 100 FTSE chief executives are foreign. (And, by the way, three-quarters of the women chief executives are foreigners – an even greater overseas ratio than among the males).
It does seem that companies prefer foreign directors to British ones, whatever their gender. Either UK candidates are poor or appointments committees are biased.
It would be as wrong to have quotas for the proportion of women on boards as it would be to have limits on the number of overseas chief executives however. Forcing boards to appoint the best women rather than the best person is no answer, and compelling them to search for a female simply to meet legal or unofficial governance standards is a distortion of decision making as well as discrimination against a competent male who is rejected because of his gender.
The good news from a survey by Cranfield Management School is that while the number of women on FTSE boards has not changed over the past year (though the number of males has fallen), the pipeline of potential female directors has rocketed. A year ago, 1,877 women sat on executive committees, senior teams or boards at quoted companies; now there are 2,281.
That suggests a large pool of female managers that ought to be available for main board positions, and the more who put themselves forward, the more women will get top jobs. And by developing our own talent, the more of them will be British.
