Minimal progress has been made in balancing gender representation in senior positions at top JSE-listed companies since January 2020, according to the PwC South Africa’s 2022 Executive Directors Report.
This was while equal female representation in senior management and executive positions had been a long-standing area of focus within the corporate sector.
PwC SA said yesterday it had long maintained that the first and most important step towards resolving the gender pay gap was equal gender representation within senior positions.
Leila Ebrahimi, PwC South Africa People and Organisation Reward co-lead, said while all were familiar with the setbacks Covid-19 posed to the equality agenda, the world was normalising to a point where it was no longer appropriate to look for reasons why inequality persisted.
“It’s Women’s Month, and every time it rolls around we wait to be told that gender equality has made significant progress. We have all become familiar with the setbacks the pandemic posed to the equality agenda... but the world has normalised to a point where it is no longer appropriate to talk about excuses, or even look for reasons why inequality persists. We must look forward and commit to action,” it said.
To look at whether female representation was being addressed appropriately, PwC recently analysed new hires into vacant executive roles in JSE-listed companies in the past year to assess the ratio of female to male appointments.
As at June, only seven of the JSE Top 100 companies were found to be led by female chief executives (compared to 5 percent across all listed companies in the past year), with the representation of female chief financial officers (CFOs) sitting at 19 percent (compared to 17 percent last year).
Over the entire executive population of all JSE-listed companies, 15 percent was female (compared to 13 percent last year).
It said that it found that between January 2020 and June 2022 there were 208 new appointments to executive positions across the JSE. Of these, only 53 (25 percent) were female.
In the JSE Top 100 there were 77 new appointments to executive positions of which 21 (26 percent) were female. In the JSE Top 40 there were 33 new executive appointments of which 10 (30 percent) were female.
PwC SA said that change could be driven and accelerated. The report highlighted four key ways this could be achieved, which included successful succession planning that went beyond merely identifying appropriate individuals, but also required companies to actively seek to fill executive committee and senior management roles with skilled candidates from designated groups.
Another was understanding and developing organisational culture to ensure organisations were aware of the existing culture and listened to and engaged with female employees to better understand their perceptions of their environment and creating a supportive policy framework to support well-formulated, clear policies and one which was assessed with diversity and inclusion objectives in mind.
Finally, it said accelerating the change process with KPIs and considering mentorship and skills transfer from existing leadership to female successors could help accelerate change.
Makhosazana Mabaso, a people and organisation reward partner at PwC South Africa, said while they had observed that some progress had been made with increasing the number of female appointments to executive positions, companies also needed to focus on how to retain female talent for longer periods.
“On average, female leaders spend between one and five years in their roles, compared to males who often hold positions of between three to eight years.
“In driving the retention of female talent over the longer term, employers need to take active steps to ensure that sound and effective succession plans are in place to cement a strong pipeline of female talent.
“Employers should furthermore ensure that conscious steps are taken to afford women, particularly those identified as future successors, with the opportunities to grow within their roles and areas of expertise,” Mabaso said.
BUSINESS REPORT