What gets measured gets done, according to Women in IR
IR Magazine’s Women in IR event in London last night found speakers united in a rallying call to get more women into senior IR positions at top companies by setting targets.
Panelist Gunhild Grieve, head of IR at RWE, said: ‘When I started my career, I was absolutely against targets. I thought, no, I do not want to be hired just because I am a woman. I have changed my view. You have to set targets. Only when a company sets targets does it think about what it needs to do to achieve those targets.
‘We have seen this in Germany. For example, it now has, by law, a 30 percent target for female representation on the supervisory board. If a vacancy comes up and you have not achieved the 30 percent and you cannot find a woman, the seat has to remain empty – so it is quite strict.’
Grieve also noted that within RWE the company looked to achieve the best from the female workforce through training, by placing all female managers on courses to study what it means to be on a supervisory board, analyzing the role and duties to be undertaken, so that those women can take up more senior supervisory board posts when they became available.
Kirsty Collins, senior analyst for global responsible investment at Aviva Investors, agreed with the need for female IR senior management targets. ‘Personally, I think what gets measured gets done. If we don’t set targets, it is not going to happen,’ she said.
‘There is also a question here about the decisions the leadership team makes about talent management and moving people up, so the [gender] gap is a reflection of other leadership positions.’
Collins observed that changing attitudes within a new generation of workers will stir the issue further: ‘I think when you look at the talent coming through the business, millennials are looking for a completely different workplace. They want to see a type of business that reflects who they are and the decisions they want to see being made by management – otherwise they will vote with their feet.’
Juliana Weiss Dalton, investor relations director at Kennedy Wilson Europe, said the benefits of getting more women into senior positions creates other advantages. “One area is role models,’ she explained. ‘Having role models across the spectrum – both male and female – is important. I certainly want my young boys to have plenty of fantastic female role models when they go into the working world.’
Janet Dignan, founding editor of IR Magazine, revealed the level of challenge within the IR industry on this issue. She highlighted the IR Magazine research that found the split between men and women at junior levels within IR is pretty much 50/50, but this changes when you encounter the senior levels, where it becomes a split of 38 percent female to 62 percent male.
‘The figures are particularly bad in some of the leading financial markets,’ Dignan noted. ‘For example, when it comes to the companies on the FTSE 100, 70 percent of IR heads are male. When you look at the top 100 companies in the S&P 500, just under 80 percent of the IR departments are headed by a man. In Canada, 70 percent of the top 60 companies’ IR teams are male-led and on Germany’s DAX, 26 of the top 30 companies have IR departments led by men.’
