FREE TO READ | FM Women magazine

Understanding that gender parity at board level is critical has, according to Deloitte’s Dan Konigsburg and Sharon Thorne, contributors to the Deloitte Global Boardroom Programme’s seventh edition of Women in the Boardroom: A Global Perspective report, become something of a movement.

This surely should be no surprise as women still fight for equal rights to opportunities within corporate SA, and globally. This movement, though, needs more momentum as we begin to understand that the shifts that are needed from a mindset to a physical perspective are critical if we are to realise real change and diversity in our lifetime.

The statistics are shifting in favour of gender diversity, but as the Deloitte report points out, it’s at a very slow pace. Today, according to the Deloittes report, “a global average of just under 20% (19.7%) of board seats are held by women, an increase of just 2.8 percentage points since our last report, published in 2019. If this rate of change were to continue every two years, we could expect to reach something near parity in 2045.”

Hopefully this slow pace isn’t a future trend and that gender intelligence at least begins to help corporate SA come to grips with why diversity across the board makes business sense.

Browse through the full magazine below (zoom in or go full screen for ease of reading):