EU Report: Women on Boards

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady O’Cathain on her report and on this debate. I support getting more women on boards but I want to achieve that through merit not discrimination. The effort to get women on long lists is fine, but that is where discrimination should end. The debate often equates diversity, which is a good thing on boards, with more women. This is wrong. Female board members are not automatically more diverse than their male counterparts. Concentrating on gender diversity risks losing sight of what real diversity can contribute to board success. The report is brave to say that the economic case for more women on boards has not been made. The enthusiasts have confused correlation with causation, and I hope that Ministers, including my noble friend on the Front Bench this evening, will stick to the evidence in future and not make assertions about improved performance and productivity.

I believe that focusing on the proportion of board membership achieves diversity box-ticking without achieving sustainable change. Because the proportion of executives on boards has declined from around one-half to around one-third over the past 10 years, the focus has therefore been on non-executive appointments. However, in my view the debate needs to shift decisively towards the much more difficult issue of women executives. Why is it that management boards still look unbalanced? Why are the women who are there are often in functional roles rather than general management ones? This is partly about working practices, as the report suggests, but also about culture—as the report also suggests—and the hidden barriers in workplaces and the implicit assumptions about career patterns. These are not areas that board percentages can tackle.

Lastly, I cannot support even a reserve right of Brussels to legislate on quotas. The report should have used a little more Anglo-Saxon directness in telling the Commission where it should put its quotas.