Australia: Women in Leadership

From the Business Spectator:

In the session on Women in Leadership, Kate O’Reilly, founding director of Optimiss, opened by commenting that there are only eight per cent of women executives in the Australian corporate world.

And in the face of a changing global market, it is vital that Australian businesses must also change.

Rather than adopt the ‘easier’ solution to fix what isn’t perceived as broken, the panellists would like to see more challenging of the status quo and a continuation of shifting demographics.

One initiative is a new ASIC guideline, which will soon enable corporations to voluntarily quote their gender diversity. The concept is based on the successful Norwegian model, where more women are now in leader positions after the model became mandatory in 2005.