Ms. Hervieux-Payette, a 71-year-old Liberal senator from Quebec, is the sponsor of a bill that would legislate gender balance on boards of public companies, banks and Crown corporations — a bill that once prompted a heated tète-à-tète in the upper chamber, with Ms. Hervieux-Payette accusing the Conservatives generally of “complete fabrication,” and Ms. Frum specifically of playing games with numbers.
“I felt, during that exchange, that there was a generation gap between us,” said Ms. Frum, 50. “[Ms. Hervieux-Payette] is still fighting battles that actually, if she would look around and notice, she won. I give her generation of women a lot of credit for winning those battles — they worked hard — but they can lay down their arms now.”
Ms. Hervieux-Payette said she will do no such thing, pressing ahead with proposed legislation, which is currently before the banking committee she deputy-chairs, that would require corporate boards to comprise at least 40% of each sex or else face losing the documentation they require to do business.
“[Ms. Frum] is not a rookie herself,” Ms. Hervieux-Payette said of the Conservative senator’s generation observation. “I will continue my preaching around the country to women’s groups and I will continue talking to the younger generation about how the glass ceiling is still there.”
Her private member’s bill is unlikely to pass the Conservative-controlled Senate, let alone the Conservative-controlled House, but the discussion on Parliament Hill is part of a much larger debate about legislating equity that is already brewing on the ground.
When Kathleen Wynne is sworn in as Ontario’s premier on Feb. 11, Canada will boast six female premiers. Days after Ms. Wynne won the Ontario Liberal leadership last Saturday, Kim Campbell, the country’s only female Prime Minister, opined that our federal electoral system should be re-jigged so that each Canadian votes for, and is represented by, one male MP and one female MP.
“It would be an example to the rest of the world — an ingenious way, without quotas or affirmative action, to address the gender balance,” she wrote in The Globe and Mail.
When Nunavut was being carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1997, citizens there voted down a referendum that would have implemented exactly Ms. Campbell’s plan in the territory.
Now, at a time when roughly 85% of Canadians will live in a province or territory led by a woman, and when gender equity on corporate boards is improving organically — more than doubling over 13 years, although it is still less than 15% — does Canada need laws that force women into positions of power?
Richard Branson, the British billionaire media mogul, thinks so, telling professional network LinkedIn this month that politicians should “force a situation to where there’s 50% women on boards.” So do Spain, Iceland, France, and Norway, which in 2003 became the first to pass a law requiring gender balance on the boards of publicly traded companies. Since 2006, Ms. Hervieux-Payette’s own province has required that the boards of state-owned enterprises be half male, half female.
That bill was passed under Jean Charest who, just as he resigned to make way for incoming Premier Pauline Marois, trumpeted the fact that he presided over Quebec’s first gender-balanced Cabinet.
Federally, Canadians elected a record 76 women to Parliament, rendering the House a quarter female. The Liberals and NDP have voluntarily set their own quotas for candidate rosters, at 25% and 50% respectively, according to the Quota Project, a global database of quotas for women.
That the Quota Project database even exists is a testament to the uptick in political targets worldwide, with even patriarchal nations like Libya, Iraq and Morocco adopting them. Peru did, too, as was noted in a White House press briefing when now-former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of the Equal Partners Foundation.
In her farewell speech Thursday, Ms. Clinton did not mention quotas specifically, but said the “evidence is absolutely indisputable” that gender equity reaps economic and political returns.
Indeed, proponents of corporate quotas say targets are not only the just thing by ensuring that qualified women attain high-powered positions, but also the fiscally prudent thing; they point to studies showing that when women are at the boardroom table, companies perform better in part because women are more intuitive and risk-averse — a saving grace, for example, when the economy tanked amid financial wizardry in 2008.
“This is not a social issue for me, it’s economic,” said Ms. Hervieux-Payette, Canada’s first female Opposition Leader in the Senate, adding that head-hunters are “happy” with their “Rolodexes filled with men.”
For every proponent and study showing the virtue of quotas, though, there seems to be an opponent and a study showing the detriment of legislated equality.
The University of Western Ontario’s chair in women in management, Alison Konrad, called the idea of Canadian corporate quotas “interesting,” and pointed to a recent Quarterly Journal of Economics study showing that since Norway announced its legislation, boards that went from zero women to the mandated quota actually saw negative abnormal returns — maybe, she wondered, because corporations rushed to pack women onto their boards.
Still, even the opposing camp admits that the low proportion of women holding Canadian board seats is a dismal reality with negative consequences; Ms. Frum herself said that having, as she put it, only Scotch-sipping, cigar-smoking, golf-playing board members is going to “harm” a corporation.
But she and others argue that the numbers are improving on their own (the percentage of women on Canadian boards rose from 6.2% in 1998 to 14.5% in 2011) and that there are better ways to achieve progress — publicly naming companies with no or few female board members in a bid to ‘‘shame’’ them, for example, or pressuring corporations to voluntarily shake up their board dynamics.
In Finland, boards with no women have to explain themselves in their financial reports; in Canada, a non-profit has promised to publish a biennial report listing companies with zero female board members.
Catalyst Canada, which is specifically dedicated to moving women up in the corporate ranks, also launched an accord last March calling on corporations to boost the overall proportion of FP500 board seats held by women to 25% by 2017. The organization will maintain a list of “board-ready” women to make it easier for companies to find them.
“Moral suasion can have a strong influence,” said Fred Ketchen, a longtime Bay Streeter who once served as chairman of the Toronto Stock Exchange. “But ability has to be the consideration, especially in my business.”
Also counted among those wary of quotas is Barbara Annis, a world-renowned expert on “gender intelligence” and past chair of the Women’s Leadership Board at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Sherry Cooper, the high-profile business leader who this week stepped down as BMO’s chief economist.
Ms. Cooper said she herself has faced discrimination: In the mid-1970s, an Ohio university shunned her for a tenured professor position because she was female — specifically, a wife. She said the school believed that if she were allowed to join her husband on the economics faculty, he would essentially hold two votes on any internal decisions, implying Ms. Cooper would not think for herself.
She went on to join the nearly all-male staff at the U.S. Federal Reserve and in 1986 convinced an initially doubtful CEO that she should become Bay Street’s first female director of an investment firm. Ms. Cooper had to put her hand up and court positions men would have been handed, she said, and yet she opposes the sort of gender quota the Senate is entertaining all these years later.
“I don’t want to see tokenism and I don’t want to see women [appointed to] boards who are not competent to be on boards,” Ms. Cooper said. “If [gender balance] were required, there might be a thought that the woman board member is somehow inferior and has been forced onto it.”
To that, prominent American feminist Jaclyn Friedman retorted: “Oh, please. That’s absurd.”
She said women already face questions about how they climb the corporate ladder, pointing to Sheryl Sandberg’s 2012 appointment to Facebook’s previously all-male board amid public pressure. In her opinion, there is nothing to lose.
“A woman taking on power in a traditionally male field is always questioned about her credentials and who she slept with,” Ms. Friedman said. “There’s also this assumption that when you have a quota system, all of these less talented and less qualified women are going to jump the line. But in reality, that’s an incredibly sexist assumption because it assumes that there is a much larger pool of qualified men than women, which is ridiculous.”
That might not be so ridiculous, though.
One of the world’s Big Four auditors, KPMG, is trying to make sure more women are on track for partnership positions so that when an opportunity for promotion arises, they are both capable and at the table. Senior management in the Toronto office is already about 45% female, Chief Human Resources Officer Kristy Carscallen said, but at the partnership level that figure drops to about 25%.
Although she acknowledges the numbers need to improve, Ms. Frum maintains that the market is already taking care of the problem — and that this is no place for the government to intervene.
“Things were easier for me [than for Ms. Hervieux-Payette] and the opportunities were greater, and now for my daughters the doors are wide, wide open,” said Ms. Frum. “Why am I going to put laws in place that create quotas for women, as if they haven’t already burst through all the doors?”
Original Article
Source: nationalpost.com
Author: Kathryn Blaze Carlson
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