Len Shackleton: Cameron is wrong to pressurise firms into putting more women on company boards

Professor Len Shackleton is Economics Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

David Cameron’s trip to the Nordic-Baltic conference seems to have reinforced his view that companies should be pressurised into putting women on their boards. At present he favours Lord Davies’s “target” of 25% female board membership for FTSE-100 companies, but is hinting that insufficiently rapid progress may lead to the imposition of formal quotas on the lines pioneered in Norway. He should think carefully before going down this road.

Today just 15% of board members in top UK companies are female. Why so few? It is unlikely simply to be sexism and discrimination. Few people at the top of companies, who are all pretty bright, are likely to be that daft, given the legal sanctions against discrimination.

More likely, it has much to do with the demands of the job. Today’s top executives are very unusual, slightly scary people. Unlike first generation entrepreneurs, they are highly educated, with MBAs from the top international universities together with accountancy, financial or other professional qualifications; they have typically held major operational roles within companies, often running key divisions in other countries, and they work stupefyingly long hours and travel constantly. Many are foreign-born. They are wildly atypical of even the male population. Most of us UK males are just as unlikely to be top executives as women are.

Len Shackleton: Get the state out of sport

Len Shackleton is a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

The Government recently produced its response to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s inquiry into the governance of football. There are of course some ways in which professional football may impinge on government responsibilities – for example, the sale of broadcasting rights (which may conflict with competition law) and the notorious "football creditors rule" (by which the footballing authorities have asserted the priority of debts to other clubs over debts to the taxpayer in bankruptcy cases). But this latest intervention is focused elsewhere.
 
Its prime concern is with creating a new Football Association board, a plan to develop a new wide-ranging system of licensing/regulation of clubs, and with making major changes to the representative structures of the FA. It explicitly threatens to impose legislation in these areas if the football authorities fail to come up with agreement on these measures by the end of February next year.