From Stuff:

Companies across the Tasman are twice as likely to have female directors. Tim Hunter looks at why.


Australians, long our staunch rivals in macho sporting encounters, have clearly been working on their softer side.
How else to explain the huge difference in the number of women populating the senior corporate ranks on either side of the Tasman?
Despite Australia's famously sexist culture, the top 50 listed companies in Australia are twice as likely to have female directors around the board table than their counterparts in New Zealand.


The Sunday Star-Times compared the board composition of companies in the NZX50 with those in the ASX50 and found 46% of the New Zealand companies had female directors. For the Australian companies the figure was 83%. There are 45 women directors in the ASX50 in 57 directorships. In New Zealand, 21 women fill 24 directors posts.


These figures don't count chairmen, or CEO/managing directors, but it wouldn't make any difference in New Zealand because there aren't any women in those jobs in the top 50. The resignations this year of Theresa Gattung at Telecom and Diane Humphries at Hallenstein Glasson have made the figures look worse than they would have last year.
Australia is not much better, with just one female CEO Kerrie Mather of Macquarie Airports and two chairmen Margaret Jackson of Qantas and Elizabeth Alexander of biopharmaceutical group CSL.


How sexist is Australia? In a report on the US/Australia free trade agreement for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, an American advertising executive illustrated Australia's business culture by saying "Australians are outrageously sexist by any American standard, and things happened to me every day that would not only be politically incorrect, but also illegal (in the US)".

Rest of the article: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4261310a13.html



So, do we just hire women in a "bums on seats" manner to keep people happy or do we hire people of either sex on wether they are actually qualified to do the job?