Latest news with #boarddiversity
South China Morning Post
21-07-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
HKEX success in putting women on boards a boon to Hong Kong
Inclusion and fairness are fundamental human values, yet many societies struggle to strike a balance between removing barriers and holding everyone to high performance standards. One recent example is the controversial US rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion rules . So, it was encouraging to see Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) claim success in its push to eliminate all-male boards from companies listed on the region's third-largest bourse. HKEX said fewer than 10 of Hong Kong's roughly 2,600 listed companies had all-male boards as of the end of June. The exceptions were firms suspended from trading or temporarily out of compliance because of a resignation. At the start of the year, when an HKEX ban on single-gender boards went into effect, there were still 85 companies with all-male boards. When the policy was announced in 2022, more than 800 firms – or 40 per cent of listed companies – had no female directors. More than 21 per cent of the directors today are women. While that lags behind the global average of 27 per cent of board seats held by women as of 2024, the city is in good company with a sizeable number of markets around the world now using mandates and deadlines to push for change. The shift seems good for business. Hong Kong's Financial Services Development Council called it 'confidence-building' for investors to see HKEX taking firm steps. The move was credited with the main board's return to global leadership in initial public offerings. Katherine Ng, head of listing at HKEX, said the requirement had 'enhanced governance in our markets'. Bonnie Chan Yiting, HKEX's first female chief executive officer, said diversity 'brings more ideas, more perspectives into boardroom discussions'.
Times
09-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Young directors face fight to get on board at London-listed firms
London's biggest listed companies are hiring more women on to their boards but have been criticised for their reluctance to appoint younger directors. Of the 305 new directors hired by FTSE 350 companies last year, only 12, or 3.9 per cent, were under 45, according to research from Heidrick & Struggles, the executive headhunter, which called on businesses to 'bring in more fresh faces'. 'Boards should reflect the world their businesses operate in, and this can be achieved through a broader mix of people and experience,' Kit Bingham, head of UK board practice at Heidrick & Struggles, said. • 'Wrong lanes' hold up boardroom progress for women and minorities More than half, 57 per cent, of those joining the board of a FTSE 350 company last year were retired and the average age of new appointees increased to 58, the highest in six years. Heidrick & Struggles' research showed that London-listed companies 'remain slower to look to younger appointees' when compared with other countries. In Ireland, for example, 21 per cent of board directors hired by Dublin-listed businesses were younger than 45. In Germany the proportion was 8.2 per cent and it was 5.4 per cent in France. 'Times are tough and have been for a few years, so what I think we're seeing is a default to experience,' Bingham said. 'Equally, at a time when companies are trying to keep costs down, chairs are very careful to keep the board lean and don't want to expand the board just to give different individuals their first taste of board life.' He added: 'It is important that boards hear from a whole range of different voices; how different generations are thinking, acting and buying.' UK companies are, however, faring better when it comes to recruiting more female board directors. Half of last year's appointees on the FTSE 350 were women, compared with just 36 per cent of Fortune 500 companies in the US and 46 per cent in Germany. Heidrick & Struggles said there had now been 'five years of strong gender balance', even if last year's percentage was down on the high of 58 per cent set in 2022. The research shows that 21 per cent of new UK directors last year identified as non-white. The Parker Review suggests that FTSE 350 boards should have at least one director from an ethnic-minority background, although Bingham cautioned against adopting a 'one and done philosophy'.
Fast Company
11-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How E.l.f. is using humor and hard data to push for boardroom diversity
BY Before launching a viral campaign that would jolt corporate boardrooms, E.l.f. Beauty faced a familiar problem: a lack of data—and an even bigger lack of direction on how to turn that data into action. To tackle both, the beauty brand enlisted help from Oberland, a New York-based creative agency. After sifting through more than 35,000 data points on board diversity, the Oberland team started asking a different kind of question—not just what the numbers said, but how to make them matter. They found inspiration in an infamous 2015 New York Times analysis known as the 'John study,' which revealed that more Fortune 500 CEOs were named John than were women. 'We said, 'What if we modernize this? What if we think about this in terms of boardrooms?'' recalled Kate Charles, Oberland's chief strategy officer, speaking at Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Summit in New York last week. The result was both irreverent and revealing: a campaign called ' So Many Dicks ' that exposed a striking imbalance—there are more men named Dick on corporate boards than there are entire underrepresented groups. 'We had to break the malaise,' Charles said. 'We wanted to do it in a way that had a shocking statistic like the 'John study,' but also carried a clear call to action.' 'And that's exactly what happened,' added Laurie Lam, E.l.f.'s chief brand officer. 'We had to do something sticky, something memorable, something disruptive—and it caught fire.' CEO Buy-In While the 'so many Dicks' campaign was what really 'caught fire,' it's not even the first piece of a larger initiative the company has dubbed 'Change the Board Game,' Lam told the audience during the panel discussion. The Oakland, California-based company recently celebrated 25 consecutive quarters of net sales growth, she said, which is why the campaign also connects how embracing diversity in a company and boardroom is the profitable thing to do. Lam credited E.l.f.'s CEO, Tarang Amin, with leading the cause by fundamentally understanding why it's so important to champion diversity and ensure it's not a 'check-the-box sort of thing,' but rather the ethos and core purpose a company is built upon. And, in that way, it's not difficult to achieve diversity if there's intentionality, she said. 'Every single day, we walk that talk,' Lam said. 'It's rooted in the culture of who we are—that diversity matters, that we are rooted in positivity, inclusivity, accessibility, that makes it easy.' Messaging Matters Of course, there's been pushback—both long-standing and more recently—to diversity-focused efforts, which Charles said is 'weird,' given the results. 'There's so much proof to show that when you have a diverse board, diverse leadership, diverse base, that you're all succeeding, you're more profitable, including Dicks,' she added. 'It's really good for everybody.' But the messaging also mattered. The campaign could have been called 'too many Dicks' or 'don't be a Dick,' Charles shared, and opting for 'so many Dicks' was very intentional, along with a subhead that reads: 'So few of everyone else.' The goal was to be inclusive. 'We wanted to make sure that men felt okay to stand up for this and that they didn't feel like they were being called out, that they were being called in,' Charles said. 'And we wanted other organizations to say, 'I want to be a part of that.'' Future of DEI For a duo who has put so much energy behind supporting diversity, it might come as a surprise that neither Lam nor Charles think the DEI acronym—short for diversity, equity, and inclusion—is necessary to advance efforts. 'I don't think it needs to be an acronym,' Lam told the audience. 'I think it just becomes a way of modeling a culture that is inclusive of everyone and it stops creating these sort-of lines in the sand of who it is.' Part of the problem, Charles added, is the acronym has been weaponized as a term that's 'attacking meritocracy' and it might be good to decouple the words from it. 'People, and certainly leaders and brands, do believe in diversity—they do believe in equity, and they do believe in inclusion.' And by showcasing the impact diversity can have on a company's performance, the more it can become a status quo—and something other companies want to emulate, the women said. 'We don't even have a DEI department, it doesn't exist at E.l.f. because it exists in every single employee,' Lam said. 'It is the job of every single employee to live the truth of the company.'
