Question

To ask the Ministers for Women and Equalities, what assessment she has made of the Equality and Human Rights Commission's publication entitled Appointments to Boards and Equality Law, published in August 2014.

Government welcomed the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) legal framework on board appointments. The Guidance was only recently published (July 2014) so it is still too early to assess its impact.

The EHRC Guidance is clear that the deliberate use of all-women long-lists or shortlists is likely to constitute unlawful sex discrimination. However, where there is no predetermination to draw up an all-women shortlist and an objective and consistent assessment of all candidates demonstrates that the best qualified candidates are all women, an all-women shortlist will be lawful, just as an all-male shortlist would be in the same circumstances.

The framework is also useful in highlighting that there are many good practices that focus on positive measures that will help create an even playing field. This best practice has led to great progress being made in the number of women on boards. For the first time, every board of Britain’s top 100 companies have at least one woman and we now have over 22% women on the boards of our FTSE 100 companies (up from 12.5% in 2011).

We could not have got this far without the excellent work of the Executive Search Community to improve gender parity in our boardrooms.