Through ages, women across the world have constantly struggled for equal representation in all fields. Women make up at least half of the workforce yet that 50/50 ratio doesn’t hold true in corporate boardrooms.
Asian women particularly lag behind and are still drastically under-represented, struggling to make it to the top, as compared to other parts of the world. Bloomberg has shared a new study by Deloitte LLP, which shows that women represent only 7.8 percent of board directors in Asia whereas Europe had the most diverse boardrooms at 22.6 percent.
But as compared to the last year, boardroom diversity has improved slightly in Asia.
We have a long way to go, but we are getting there slowly and steadily.
However, the most reassuring news to come out from the report, is that India is doing pretty well compared to a host of other Asian countries, including Taiwan and South Korea.
The number of women on boards in India is slowly increasing and the country has also made the most progress in ‘naming female directors’.
The progress could be attributed to The Companies Act of 2013 which mandated that all companies were meant to have one woman director on their boards. To provide greater representation, India has also come up with an aspirational target of achieving 20% gender diversity on corporate boards by 2020.
All of its seems very fitting because various reports have suggested that having women in top positions works very well for the company.
A Catalyst report has showed that many of the Fortune 500 companies which have highest representation of women directors on board have achieved better financial performance than those have less representation of women directors on Board.