Gender equality for the chief executive roles of Australia’s top public companies is still 100 years away based on current trends, a new report has found, with progress at the executive level moving at a “glacial pace”.
The stark findings are contained in a new report from Chief Executive Women, to be released on Tuesday, which states that this year’s annual census of gender representation at the executive level of Australia’s top ASX-listed companies should be a “wake-up call” to the nation.
President of Chief Executive Women, Sam Mostyn, said the findings demonstrated that more was needed from business and government than the hope for incremental change.
“It’s just staggering to see that so many companies on the ASX have stalled or gone backwards,” Mostyn told Guardian Australia.
“It’s quite clear that incrementalism has failed … and if that’s been the hope of those companies that have stalled or gone backwards, then it is a failed strategy, and we now know that there has to be urgent action.”
There are now just 14 female chief executives among Australia’s top 200 companies – up from 11 in 2017, with women comprising 28% of all senior roles.
In the past year, the representation of women in senior leadership roles has gone backwards, with fewer companies having gender-balanced leadership teams in 2022 than in 2021.
A growing number of companies have no women at all in their leadership teams compared with 2021, and there was no improvement in the number of female chief executives in the country’s top 300 companies in the past year.
About 15% of companies – 47 of the ASX 300 – have no women in their leadership teams at all, up from 44 last year, while almost two-thirds have no women in so-called line roles.
Line roles, which are seen as the stepping stone to chief executive positions, are defined as those that drive key commercial outcomes within a company and include roles such as chief financial officer, managing director, chief operating officer and group executives.
The proportion of line roles held by women in the ASX200 started at a low base of 12% in 2017 and has increased just 3 percentage points in six years.
At the current rate of change, the report finds it would take 100 years – until 2122 – to achieve gender balance in chief executive roles, while it would be 2058 before there is gender balance in line roles.
First Nations women, and women of migrant, refugee and diverse cultural backgrounds, also “remain woefully underrepresented in senior leadership”, the report notes.
Mostyn, who was last week appointed to lead the government’s new Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, said there was a need to push companies to do better, saying accountable and consequential gender equality targets were key.
The report points to better gender parity results among bigger companies, which Mostyn said was attributable to them being more likely to have set targets.
“They’re in the public’s eye, they’re on the stock exchange at the highest levels, they’re under scrutiny, and they are just led by people … who say ‘I get this, and I’m going to make it a mark of my leadership to fix this’.”
The report calls for a range of actions from both investors and government, including embedding a “gender lens” in both policy development and for investment processes.
It also advocates delivering universal early childhood education and expanding paid parental leave – two key demands from last week’s jobs and skills summit.
Mostyn said the government could also leverage its procurement budget to prioritise organisations with gender-balanced leadership in a cost-free move that would show federal leadership.
The government has been resisting calls to bring forward its signature childcare policy from July next year to January, with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese saying on Monday that spending needed to be contained in the budget.
He indicated that expanding paid parental leave was something the government would “consider” but hosed down expectations of any policy change in the October budget.
