Co-op sets ‘targets with teeth’ for boardroom recruitment
13 March 2013
The Co-operative Group has gone public with plans to increase female representation on boards.
Wed, 13 Mar 2013
The Co-operative Group has gone public with plans to increase female representation on boards.
The move follows in the footsteps of a similar path taken by professional services firm Ernst & Young (EY), described as ‘targets with teeth’ by a partner at the company at a London event yesterday discussing diversity and inclusion issues.
At the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (enei) conference, The enei Provocation, EY partner Liz Bingham, said that when the firm came out with its own targets, to ensure women accounted for 30% of partners hired by 2015, with black and minority ethnic (BAME) employees making up 10%, “we were a bit rash and we went public with them”.
Going public turned these into “targets with teeth”, because outside observers, and The Times journalist Alex Spence in particular, vowed to hold them to account on the goals.
Bingham said that herself, Harry Gaskell (another EY partner who chairs enei) and the firm as a whole are against targets as a way of increasing diversity in the workplace, but notes that the targets and the media profile they enjoyed “really focused the minds of leadership within the firm”.
Earlier in the day, the government’s Lords spokesperson for women and equality Baroness Stowell suggested the legislation “is not always the best means or the only means” of ensuring more inclusive recruitment, and the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Baroness O’Neill, agreed that there were many solutions to diversity issues including that of female executives, but “setting quotas is generally not one of them”.
The Co-operative Group has gone public with plans to increase female representation on boards.
The Co-operative Group, the UK’s largest mutual business according to the company, is a major food retailer and financial services operators, and has promised to go beyond the government-backed recommendation to ensure 25% of seats on FTSE 100 executive boards are occupied by women by 2015, saying it will ensure that female executives make up 40% of board seats across the group’s businesses by 2018.
The move follows in the footsteps of a similar path taken by professional services firm Ernst & Young (EY), described as ‘targets with teeth’ by a partner at the company at a London event yesterday discussing diversity and inclusion issues.
At the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (enei) conference, The enei Provocation, EY partner Liz Bingham, said that when the firm came out with its own targets, to ensure women accounted for 30% of partners hired by 2015, with black and minority ethnic (BAME) employees making up 10%, “we were a bit rash and we went public with them”.
Going public turned these into “targets with teeth”, because outside observers, and The Times journalist Alex Spence in particular, vowed to hold them to account on the goals.
Bingham said that herself, Harry Gaskell (another EY partner who chairs enei) and the firm as a whole are against targets as a way of increasing diversity in the workplace, but notes that the targets and the media profile they enjoyed “really focused the minds of leadership within the firm”.
Earlier in the day, the government’s Lords spokesperson for women and equality Baroness Stowell suggested the legislation “is not always the best means or the only means” of ensuring more inclusive recruitment, and the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Baroness O’Neill, agreed that there were many solutions to diversity issues including that of female executives, but “setting quotas is generally not one of them”.
