Oxford Brookes University (above) carries out valuable research into equality and diversity
The USA has now voted for a new President and the UK for BREXIT – all during 2016 and both events are considered to have produced shock results. Some believe that the ramifications – to be felt more keenly next year – will affect women as a group profoundly with losses to equality measures that have been fought for so keenly during the last decades.
Additionally today is Equal Pay Day. Noted by equality groups and the media in the UK as an important yearly date, it highlights that despite the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970, the average British woman still earns 13.9 per cent less than her male counterpart. Women are more likely to be in low-paid, low-skilled jobs compared to men. 90% per cent of the STEM workforce is male and 80% of care workers are women (Figures produced by the Fawcett Society).
The pay gap has closed a little since last year, but despite the fears of some over recent political events, could there be hope for working women next year?
In 2017 large organisations will be asked to start reporting their pay gap data, and the following year allow these findings to be available publicly. Will this be an important step in the race for equality?
Essential research into equality is being carried out by Oxford Brookes University’s Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice with a focus on ‘women and leadership’, and ‘work life balance’ among other areas.
Established in 2004, it brings together academic and management expertise from the University’s Faculty of Business, School of Law and Directorate of Human Resources.
The Centre’s Director, Professor Simonetta Manfredi, has just published research along with KPMG and the 30% Club into the importance of the inclusion of academics on company boards and within this group the important role that women academics can play.
We were delighted to be allowed to interview her in her academic office at Oxford Brookes University about how the Centre came about and the future of its research work.
Here at The Broadcast PR Business we take a strong interest in the progression of women into leadership and the movement of women onto boards is no less important.
Now KPMG has launched new research with Oxford Brookes University (pictured) and the 30% Club, called “Changing Places: Women on Boards” which we are happy to pass on.
Reading the release, it was interesting to see KPMG reference the work of the Davies Report of five years ago that women were being overlooked on board appointments. We interviewed Lord Davies at that time and he stated that he didn’t believe in quotas but he had become increasingly aware of the large pool of talented women from different backgrounds who could make an important contribution on company boards. Watch our interview here…
Now KPMG is furthering this important research and this is the first major UK study into the exchange of board-level talent between business and academia. This has found that UK boards lag behind their US counterparts when it comes to professional and sector diversity.
KPMG reports that:
• US company boards are over seven times as likely to include a senior academic compared to boards in the UK.
• There are currently just eight academic NEDs on the boards of FTSE 100 companies, whereas there are 59 academic directors serving on Fortune 100 boards in the US.
• UK board chairs interviewed for the research saw two major areas where academic NEDs can make a valuable contribution: where the academic expertise matches the company focus and where they bring university executive leadership to company boards.
• There is an informal bias against having academics on corporate boards, expressing concern that academics might argue on intellectual rather than commercial lines and hamper board discussions.
Commenting on the findings Melanie Richards, Vice Chair at KPMG in the UK, said:
“By bringing together a more diversified group, business may benefit from more thoughtful discussions, which should strengthen the quality of decision making and outcomes.
“It is clear that academia remains a largely untapped talent pool for UK plc and there is much work to be done to promote mobility in both directions”
The study also highlighted that the flow of female talent from business to university boards is relatively healthy compared to female academics entering corporate boardrooms. 33% of women on university boards come from the private sector whereas less than 2% of female NEDs in the FTSE 100 come from academia. This means cross-sector mobility also has huge potential to improve the gender diversity of boards.
Added to this, higher education is more gender diverse than business with women holding nearly 40% of university boardroom roles. By widening their search to include senior academics, UK corporates would also be significantly widening the pool of female candidates.
Professor Simonetta Manfredi, Professor in Equality and Diversity Management and Director of the Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice at Oxford Brookes University, commented:
“There has been good progress in improving equality in recent years for both academic and corporation boards, but more work needs to be done. Through this report, I hope we can build on this momentum and encourage businesses to seize the opportunity to benefit further from the skills and knowledge of senior academics.”
The study ends with some practical suggestions to achieving this:
1. Promote business understanding of academic capabilities.
2. Increase academic participation on company boards.
3. Encourage more women to apply for university board roles.
4. Advise women to think about board roles earlier.
5. Help recruiters to understand female career patterns.
About Oxford Brookes University’s Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice
Set in a historic student city, Oxford Brookes is one of the UK’s leading universities and enjoys an international reputation for teaching excellence and innovation as well as strong links with business and industry. More information is available on the Oxford Brookes website at http://www.brookes.ac.uk
The Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice was established in 2004. It is a cross-institutional centre which specialises in inter-disciplinary research and knowledge exchange on equality and diversity with a focus on work and organisational settings and its wider societal impact. The Centre brings together academic and management expertise from the University’s Faculty of Business, School of Law and the Directorate of Human Resources. Its main activities include: interdisciplinary research linking legal and management perspectives to inform equality policies and practices in the workplace and around; events to facilitate debate and discussion on equality and diversity issues between academics, policy-makers, trade unions, senior managers and equality specialists; consultancy and knowledge exchange to assist organisations in developing and implementing equality programmes. Further information is available on the Centre’s webpages.
About 30% Club
The 30% Club campaign was launched in the UK in 2010 with a target of achieving a minimum of 30% women on FTSE-100 boards – currently the figure stands at 26% up from 12.5%. As of 2016, that target has been expanded beyond the FTSE-100 to a minimum of 30% women on FTSE-350 boards by 2020. In tandem with this, the 30% Club has introduced a pipeline target of a minimum of 30% women at senior management level of FTSE-100 companies by 2020.
The 30% Club was founded by Helena Morrissey CBE, Chair of Newton Investment Management and Chair of the Investment Association. Day-to-day activities in the UK are now led by 30% Club Global Chair, Brenda Trenowden of ANZ, and a Steering Committee.
The 30% Club currently has Clubs across the world in the US, Canada, Australia, the GCC, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, Italy and Southern Africa.
About KPMG
KPMG LLP, a UK limited liability partnership, operates from 22 offices across the UK with approximately 12,000 partners and staff. The UK firm recorded a revenue of £1.96 billion in the year ended September 2015. KPMG is a global network of professional firms providing Audit, Tax, and Advisory services. It operates in 155 countries and has 174,000 professionals working in member firms around the world. The independent member firms of the KPMG network are affiliated with KPMG International Cooperative (“KPMG International”), a Swiss entity. Each KPMG firm is a legally distinct and separate entity and describes itself as such.
This September The Future Cities Forum will be back debating the role of private and public financing of our city planning and development projects. Retail expansion, the building and re-location of museums alongside hotel developments all help to keep our cities growing vibrantly while improving social and economic health.
The autumn forum follows our highly successful inaugural debate where the art historian Andrew Graham Dixon, Professor Peter Rees from The Bartlett and ARUP’s Alexander Jan joined contributors from Land Securities, Grosvenor and Cambridge City Council – and from Denmark, Holland and the UK. The beauty of Italy’s renaissance squares and townscapes was compared with today’s ideas of city planning and looked to the future of design in the next century. In particular discussion focussed on the changing face of London as a world city. Professor Rees commented ‘London has survived fires, plague, bombing and financial catastophies, but everytime it has bounced back more strongly’,while the architectural practice – HOK’s London Principal, Daniel Haajar said:’Everyone looks at London as a magnet for talent and more importantly as a thought-provoking urban environment that really does export that particular niche worldwide’.
As a leadership coach, I was delighted to be asked to the 2016 KPMG hosted Female FTSE Board Report event today in Canary Wharf, London, which showcased recent research findings from Cranfield School of Management, City University, London and Queen Mary, University of London – www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/ftse.
The report reveals that the pace of change for women across FTSE 100 boards has stalled with a decrease in board turnover rates and a smaller share of new appointments in the six months from September 2015 to March 2016. However, the good news is that there are no longer any all-male boards in the FTSE 100.
Senior Partner and Chairman of KPMG, Simon Collins, welcomed the research into female advancement and leadership success, saying ‘I have no doubt that including a more diverse mix of experience and opinion within our leadership team…will make us a more profitable as well as a more responsible business’.
The report this year looks at gender balance below board level, across FTSE 100 Executive Committees, among other issues. Findings indicate that women hold only 19.4% of Executive Committee roles, and that these are more likely to be functional roles, rather than operational and C-suite ones.
Sir Philip Hampton, Chair of the Hampton-Alexander Review, spoke of the need to increase the number of women progressing to top roles at GSK. The company provides an 18 month programme to support the development of high performing mid-to-senior level female leaders and to date some 236 women have completed or are currently receiving individual and group coaching sessions.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State and Minister for Intellectual Property, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, discussed the need for women to develop their communication skills while on boards. She said there should be an emphasis on the need to listen effectively, and develop the know-how over when to offer advice and how much.
This approach certainly rang a bell with my coaching activities where the individual voice is developed along with the skills of board effectiveness. Only then can we harness the unique ideas and talents of our board members to build stronger businesses.
Improving board communication is becoming a vital issue as companies work to develop their risk processes post-crash.
How board meetings are approached in terms of the information given to members and how expertise and knowledge is developed, can all impact on the future financial success and safety of that particular company.
Recently I interviewed risk expert Patricia Jackson, Senior Adviser at EY, about the challenges for board members in understanding technical topics such as risk, which some may not feel qualified to comment on. Her advice was firm: hold workshops the night before a board meeting to train members in understanding the complexities.
Patricia was formerly Head of the Financial Industry and Regulation Division of the Bank of England and is also a board director of Atom Bank.
Risk is now a hot topic for boards and the Chief Risk Officer’s influence and responsibilities have broadened.
Patricia feels there is a tendency to overlook how much time non-executives have to devote to a board role and delivering a thousand page report for directors to wade through is to be avoided.
This may be an important piece of advice if boards are to operate effectively.
Julia Mundy is a principal lecturer at The Centre for Governance, Risk and Accountability at the University of Greenwich and has carried out research into board effectiveness. She says it is difficult to elicit the characteristics of an effective board.
A well designed questionnaire among board members on how effective the board is being, she says, will reveal a lot in terms of subjective views but it may not produce hard evidence.
While diagnostic tools, such as the Belbin test – used to identify effective team members during selection procedures – are of some use, she also warns that this exam cannot discriminate between an ‘innovator’ who producers useful ideas and a “dreamer”.
Mundy steers anyone tasked with board selection towards the personality tests of qualified occupational psychologists but cautions that there might still have to be agreement on which characteristics in people are the best for an effective board.
Interviewing Flybe Chairman, Simon Laffin, it became clear that the most important element of running an effective board, is to develop a culture where an ‘appetite for risk’ is well understood. Only then can a proper process be discussed and in the long term, a crisis avoided.
Meanwhile as a coach, it seems to me that all prospective board members would benefit from effective discussion skills training – helping directors to ask the pertinent question without fear of disapproval.
Most people, even at the top of their professions, struggle with speaking in public. Coaching in strong presentation skills can create impactful delivery when asked to show leadership of thought.
Universities UK says graduates, particularly those studying for computer science degrees, are much in demand from employers, but may be currently losing out to foreign competition when applying for jobs.
Chief Operating Officer, Jeremy Holmes, speaking at The Behavioural Finance Forum’s recent debate, “Behaviour change: recruiting and retaining top talent” at The Shard in London, warns that some graduates do not display the business skills that UK employers are looking for.
However, he is also critical of employers in the UK for not helping to grow talent, with a thirty-five per cent fall in sponsored part-time study since 2013, preventing students from developing commercial awareness while studying.
Holmes claims only four per cent of graduates find jobs in finance immediately after leaving university.
By 2022, he states there will be two-million more jobs in the UK, requiring graduate level education.
Meanwhile, Annette Andrews, Head of Human Resources at Lloyd’s of London, said that the corporation has widened graduate opportunities this year through a successful diversity campaign.
Norman Pickavance, Brand and Culture Leader at Grant Thornton, added to this by saying that “clients increasingly want advisers who can work with them”, highlighting the need for good communication skills among employees and an inquisitiveness about community in the wider world.
While Dr Patricia Hind of Ashridge Centre for Executive Education, Hult International Business School, looked to the future through advising employers that personalised benefits are crucial to retaining top talent in later years: ‘The workforce now knows it needs to think about security by being “portable”, and being able to move its’ skills around. So what is really valued is that benefits packages are individualised by destination employers.’ Dr Hind says that the most highly-regarded rewards often centre on career growth opportunities.
Exeter University Business School’s Director of the One Planet MBA, Nicolas Forsans, concluded by saying that senior talent needs the time and space to develop thinking on the topic of ‘sustainable ways of working’ to develop excellence in future leadership.
The Behavioural Finance Forum was created in March 2013 to bring together top academics with industry leaders and journalists to debate the impact of human behaviour on financial markets.
For more information and on future events, please contact the Co-Founders, Heather Fearfield or Matthew Locke at The Broadcast PR Business on:
Very little government medical funding goes to help scientists carry out research into eye diseases and conditions that often blight peoples’ lives.
So Heather Fearfield was delighted to be asked to film at the Moorfields Eye Charity event last Wednesday evening where scientists unveiled their plans for new research and patients were thanked for raising much needed finance.
Hundreds of patients last year took part in a sponsored walk from Moorfields Hospital through the City of London to Southbank and it is hoped that many more will join them in March 2016 for another annual walk.
But the good news is that you do not have to wait to register. You can put your name down now through www.moorfields.nhs.uk/eye2eye.
Professor Pete Coffey (pictured) discussed how his work with stem cell technology aims to cure blindness in patients suffering from macular degeneration. He says so much can be detected in the cells at the back of the eye and this is helping scientists also learn how to help with other diseases such as dementia and cardio-vascular problems.
Another use of research is in developing techniques to detect eye disease earlier. Professor Coffey says blindness is a huge burden to carry and continued financial support is much needed.
As a leadership coach, I was delighted to be asked to the 2016 KPMG hosted Female FTSE Board Report event today in Canary Wharf, London, which showcased recent research findings from Cranfield School of Management, City University, London and Queen Mary, University of London – 
London – 18th November 2015
