Last week Telstra announced its long-serving chairman Catherine Livingstone will be stepping down in the coming months.
Livingstone’s one of very few women to chair the boards of Australia’s top 200 listed companies and arguably the most powerful women in corporate business. She’s been on the Telstra board for 15 years.
Indeed, this Fairfax piece shares anecdotes about her influence, noting the phone call to ‘get the deal done’ that kicked along negotiations between Telstra and NBN Co back in 2011. Livingstone’s appeared on many a ‘most influential’ and ‘most powerful’ list, often as the sole woman amongst the top positions. She’s not the loudest female voice in corporate Australia and certainly doesn’t speak at a lot of events or push her public profile, but she does quietly wield her influence to make things happen. She’s been said to have a “brain the size of a planet” by a fellow board director, Stephen Crittenden, and is simply concerned with getting the job done.
Her retirement from the Telstra board comes less than a year after the only female CEO of a big four bank stepped down: Gail Kelly And while Livingstone will move on to other boards and roles (today the Commonwealth Bank’s announced she’ll join its board) it’s unlikely any future position will be as powerful as that of Telstra chair.
So where does that leave the representation of women — particularly in the most powerful of positions — within the senior ranks of Australia’s largest listed entities?
Women now make up 21.9% of company board directors on the ASX 200 in what’s been a slow but subtle increase in such numbers in recent years (up from 8.3% back in 2009).
But that’s on the ASX 200, which gets significantly more attention when it comes to the numbers of women on boards. Go beyond the 200 and the numbers get even worse.
Meanwhile over at Google, Australian managing director Maile Carnegie (pictured below) has also stepped down this week. While she’s leaving for another big role leading digital at ANZ, her departure means there’s now one less female CEO/MD at the top of our largest organisations.
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So who’ll replace these women as trailblazers?
We don’t just need to see more board directors and more women in senior executive ranks, but also more at the very top of organisations. The people in such positions are those that become household names and regularly feature on the front pages of our major newspapers. They also have the opportunity to wield significant influence and to drastically change the culture within their organisations.
We’re in for a long wait before chair and CEO roles are shared equally between men and women in corporate Australia. And sadly, this is one measure of ‘progress’ where success can quickly come undone with the resignation of just one woman.