Recruiters can play an important role in helping more women reach board level, according to participants in a Recruitment & Employment Confederation roundtable discussion held earlier this week to mark International Women’s Day. 

The issue of under-representation of women on boards has become a hot topic in recent years, following the publication of the Davies Report in 2011. This called for businesses to ensure a minimum of 25% female representation on their boards by 2015. Two years on, 17.3% of FTSE 100 non-executives are female, compared with 12.5% when the report was published.

Participants on the panel event, attended by Recruiter, acknowledged that some progress had been made, but agreed that recruiters could play an important role in further progress. 

Karen Richards, sector head, retail and consumer at Penna and founder of Women in Retail, said it was up to recruiters to take “personal ownership of your own attitude”. 

The panel agreed that one of the biggest issues holding women back was that they often had family responsibilities, which meant they needed more flexible work patterns. However, there was often reluctance among employers to provide this flexibility at senior levels.

“The first thing is to challenge this stigma,” said Emma Stewart, co-founder of Women Like Us, a social business that works with women who want to carry on working after they've had children. “We have a role to have those conversations.” 

Faced with this, Richards said the recruiter’s approach should be: “Who is the best person for this role? This is the talent I want, and this is how it will work for me. If there is a need for flexibility, then we can work with the client and the candidate to manage that.” 

Also at the roundtable, Jane Kelly, owner of management consultancy JK Consulting, said there was a role for executive search consultants to help women develop “that inner confidence” to apply for senior roles. “If they don’t see themselves in a role then no-one else will either,” she said. 

Stewart saw a role for consultancies to advise their clients on job design. For example, did companies really need an HR expert to work five days a week, which was more difficult for many women with a family, when three of those days were just doing admin? 

Elsewhere this week, Angela Mortimer, director of business support recruiter Angela Mortimer, held a lunch event this week to mark International Women’s Day, where the audience heard speeches by Channel 5 newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky, Ros Taylor, managing director of leadership consultancy Ros Taylor Group, retail industry advisor Meg Lustman and Felicity Green OBE, former director of publishing company Mirror Group. 

Mortimer tells Recruiter that for recruiters to help women have successful careers: “You have to be interested in more than just raising an invoice, you have to be interested in the female career. You have to have a dedicated attitude, always not just occasionally.”

She adds that the starting point was that recruiters should be interested in placing women in open-ended positions with the potential for career progression rather than just filling a job. “Having that attitude is gold dust,” she said.