Skills shortage partly to blame for lack of female CEOs, research suggests

Only seven of the JSE’s top 100 companies are run by women CEOs, a new survey shows, highlighting the glaring gender imbalance that continues to overshadow SA’s corporate sector despite efforts to ensure greater diversity at the top.

Financial services firm PwC’s annual survey of listed company executive directors released on Tuesday showed that though the representation of women in CEO and CFO posts had improved, women still occupied just 19% of top finance posts in June, up from 17% in 2021. 

Across the JSE, female CEOs constituted just 8%, up from 5% a year earlier, while CFOs sat at 22% from 17%. Among all the locally listed entities, the female representation at executive level stood at 15%, moving up slightly from 13%.

PwC’s research suggested that SA’s skills shortage and the bidding war for talent is contributing to the dearth of women executives, who tend to stay in their posts for shorter stretches, with female executives spending one to five years in their roles compared with the three to eight years typical of their male counterparts. But PwC’s experts said companies needed to make more effort to ensure appropriate succession planning.

PwC’s Makhosazana Mabaso said employers should also ensure that conscious steps are taken to afford women, particularly those identified as future successors, with the opportunities to grow within their roles and areas of expertise.

The PwC survey found that there were only 53 women among the 208 new executive appointments across the JSE between January 2020 and June 2022 and, of these, only 53 (or 25%) were female. 

“We are all familiar with the setbacks Covid-19 posed to the equality agenda, but the world is normalising to a point where it is no longer appropriate to look for reasons why inequality persists,” said Leila Ebrahimi, co-lead at PwC SA people and organisation reward.

“There is very often a struggle to fill an executive role. It’s challenging and time-consuming to find someone with sufficient expertise and the right profile to fill in the executive role,” Ebrahimi said in an interview.

“The time and the need to stabilise the ship and protect and maintain shareholder value becomes primary in considerations and gender considerations become secondary.”

Black African CEOs running top-100 companies listed on the JSE were just 14%, with Indians making up 7% and coloureds only 1%, while white CEOs make up 78%, the report indicated.

Transformation in the corporate sector remains a challenge nearly 30 years into SA’s democracy, though progress has been made.

Earlier in 2022, Absa sparked a backlash when it appointed Arrie Rautenbach as its new CEO, replacing Daniel Mminele, who left over apparent differences with the board on the lender’s strategy.

However, banks have steadily been making progress in achieving targets set by the Financial Sector Code.

According to the 2022 Transformation in Banking Report, compiled by Intellidex on behalf of the Banking Association SA (Basa) for the period 2017-2020, banks made progress on preferential procurement and black ownership, but fell short of their management control targets.

mahlangua@businesslive.co.za