30% Club Global Summit 2013

i can well remember when helena first asked me to join the 30 club and i paused for quite a while because i thought why is it 30 why isn't it a higher number why shouldn't it be 50 of the population are women but we have to start somewhere and i decided to get behind this and try and make a difference the 30 club was launched officially in november 2010 with seven founding chairmen but the kernel of the idea came a year earlier when i realized that although there was great work being done by companies and individuals to try to develop women's careers we weren't really seeing much in terms of results and i thought perhaps there were two things we were doing wrong one was we weren't evolving men enough and secondly we needed a measurable goal and that's where the 30 target came in but it's not a call for a quota this is about business-led voluntary action um designed to create meaningful sustainable change really changing business culture hsbc spans something like 80 countries of the world so it's really important for us to have diversity on the board we have eight nationalities among 17 directors we have four of our 13 non-executive directors are female and the balance between gender experience age background and geographical knowledge and experience is hugely important and gender diversity brings an additional element that's really important to the board discussions i support gender diversity because i think it makes sense for companies and i think there are three basic reasons why that's so the first is that um it broadens the talent pool that seems to be self-evident it's difficult to find good non-executive directors no matter what anyone says there's great competition for them so if you brought in the talent pool you increase your chances of success the second thing is that in terms of board composition it allows your board to more accurately reflect your staff your customers your stakeholders to become a more representative and responsive board and the third reason because it's the right thing to do i think they can also assist the focus on helping the executive development of women in organizations to ensure that boards are strengthened both in executive and non-executive terms from the female area i believe that the biggest remaining challenge for the 30 club is to extending the gender diversity into the ftse 350. i think we have achieved a great deal there's more to come but we've achieved a great deal with the ftse 100 but it's the next step to the 350 which will be a challenge i think another challenge for the 30 club and a very important challenge over the next 18 months or so certainly over the next several years is to focus on increasing the number of women chairmen in at least ftse 100 companies and hopefully more broadly there really aren't that many women chairmen there are some very good ones and i think that that's a natural follow-on to the growing number of women who are becoming experienced directors on public company boards women i've spent you know the last uh probably two years talking about nothing but women you know and my wife has an opinion on that but uh you know the reality of the women on board public inquiry is that uh together with the 30 club in collaboration we have created a huge change in the boardrooms of the uk boards need diversity in their thinking they need diversity in the boardroom and so i think this is just the right thing to do there's absolutely no doubt that mixed gender boards do set a new standard of better atmospherics better dynamics and ultimately therefore better decision making i keep on saying to people that

the 30 club the steering committee other organizations collectively we've got to keep the pressure up because this is good for business this year we've got three major ambitions firstly is to make sure the momentum continues can't be complacent we're not quite at 30 yet um secondly we want to focus more on the pipeline this is about sustainable meaningful change in business culture not just about a few numbers in the board and last but definitely no means least we want to go global