The Diversity Council has launched a campaign for organisations to be early adopters of the new ASX guidelines – as reported in The Daily Telegraph and News Limited syndicated papers today.  sphinxx SheEO Jennifer Dalitz was called on to comment, and said businesses were doing themselves a disservice by not putting women into board positions.

“Financial results are up to 35 per cent stronger when there is women representation on the board,” Ms Dalitz said.  “Having greater female diversity leads to general diversity, so a company is then able to make better decisions that are less driven by ‘group think’.

“It’s this last factor that results in the easy decisions being made — and this may not be the right one.”

Ms Dalitz said women were hungry to get on boards and were more than qualified, but they did not push as hard as men and did not move in circles that would make their appointment easier.

“Research has found that women won’t apply for these positions unless they have nine out of 10 competencies, whereas men will go in with just four of those 10 competencies,” she said.

“According to the 2008 Global Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum, women in Australia are extremely qualified, they are ranked number one in terms of education and qualifications, yet we ranked in 2008 at number 21 and we’ve been declining year on year.”

Ms Dalitz said Moldova, Trinidad and Tobago and Mozambique had better rankings.

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