Women make up a greater proportion of ASX300 boards than ever before, but in positions of power and greater pay– chairs and CEOs– they’re still substantially under-represented.
A recently published study by proxy advisor Ownership Matters looked at public company directors who have served on boards for Australia’s biggest 300 companies in the 2022 financial year. Findings showed one in three non-executive directors are women.
Across the 290 sampled ASX300 entities surveyed, only 33 had boards chaired by women and only 4 had a female chair and CEO– they were AMP, Bendigo & Adelaide Bank, Lynas and Spark New Zealand.
“Whilst more than one in three non-executive directors are now female, it is surprising that this cohort has still only produced 33 chairs across the largest 290 companies that we surveyed,” OM director Dean Paatsch said.
Across the ASX300, female directors now hold a record 34.2 per cent of positions (717 out of 2,098) following 40 new female roles added over the past 2 years.
In the ASX100, there’s now no all male boards remaining, and of the two boards in the ASX200 with all male boards (Core Lithium and De Grey Mining), both appointed their first female director in 2023.
And yet, in the ASX100, there’s only 10 female chairs and 13 female CEOS.
This study was the first deep dive into Australian public company boards since Ownership Matters’ inaugural 2020 assessment of board trends over the previous 15 year period.
Pay disparity
Despite more women sitting on boards, the study found female directors are still being paid less than their male counterparts.
Findings also show female directors are younger than male directors and remain in their positions for shorter periods of time.
“Of the 15 highest paid professional directors in 2022 who received more than $1 million in fees, only one female features,” said Paatsch, adding that this shows “the men are allowing record numbers of female directors into the tent, but are yet to meaningfully hand over the best paid chairing roles.”
The sole female is Maxine Brenner who has since left her director position at Orica from the end of the 2022 financial year and joined Telstra as a director. She sits on the boards of Qantas, Woolworths, Origin Energy and Orica, alongside other professional executive directors who were paid in excess of $1 million in the 2022 financial year. Brenner was the second-highest paid Qantas board member behind Richard Goyder.