India reduces the gender gap in the boardroom

Every day there are new reports on gender discrimination, inequality and mistreatment of women. But at least one recent report -- The Credit Suisse Research Institute’s bi-annual CS Gender 3000 report -- has some positive numbers when it comes to closing the gender gap at the work place in India.

On average, since the end of 2013 to the end of 2015, India has closed the gender gap in boardrooms by 14.7 percent. This may look like a small figure, but its impact is huge in a country with a population of 1.2 billion. The boardroom diversity has increased from 12.7 percent at the end of 2013 to 14.7 percent at year-end 2015, according to the report.

There are a few ups and downs in the results, but the overall report looks promising for India. Asia as a region has pulled up its socks in terms of addressing the question of gender diversity.

India in particular saw a slight decline in management diversity, the numbers being 7.2 percent in 2015 in contrast to 7.8 in 2014. In Asia region, it has the second lowest representation of women in senior management level. Japan and Korea are at the bottom of the list in this region with only 2.3 percent representation.

Bloombergquint.com reported that “Of the 265 Asia-Pacific companies with over $10 billion market capitalisation, those with at least one female board member delivered 58 percent outperformance in share prices from 2006 to July 2016,” according to the report.

The research report also revealed women make up 14.1 percent of CFOs worldwide, with China leading the Asia region with 22 percent female representation.

Norway - at 46.7 percent- topped the charts with the highest percentage of women represented on corporate boards, followed by France (34 percent), Sweden (33.6 percent), Italy (30.8 percent) and Finland (30.8 percent). Among the 12 Asia-Pacific countries surveyed, Australia has the highest representation of women in the boardroom (20.1 percent).

The report also suggests that female CEOs are 50 per cent more likely than male CEOs to have a female CFO, and 55 per cent more likely to have women running business units. All that talk about women pitting against each other can be shut down now with statistics that show their support towards the same gender.

Feature Image: forbes.com