A leading group of international businesswomen yesterday called on the world's 200 biggest male-dominated companies to step up efforts to give women more leadership roles in large corporations.
Although the number of women on corporate boards in Fortune Global 200 companies increased from 285 to 308 since 2004, men still hold the lion's share of board seats, with nearly 89 percent, a report issued by Corporate Women Directors International (CWDI) showed.
Little progress has been made to ensure boardroom equality of the sexes, the report, which followed up on a similar study conducted in 2004, lamented.
"If over 80 percent of buying decisions are being made by women -- from cars to tires to food to technology to energy -- why wouldn't you have them represented in your company?" CWDI chairwoman Irene Natividad said, urging corporations to rectify the situation.
The eight countries with the largest cluster of 2006 Fortune Global 200 companies -- the US, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Italy -- have all made progress in appointing women directors since 2004, the report said.
"However, the majority of the largest companies in Japan, Korea, Italy, Venezuela, Russia and China, for instance, still do not have women directors," it said.
Japan, the second biggest economy in the world, lagged far behind the US, whose companies led the list of those empowering women executives.
In the 27 Japanese companies on the Fortune listing, only five board members out of 389 were women, making for a meager 1.3 percent.
In the US, women account for 166 of the 941 board members in firms on the Fortune Global 200 listing, or 17.6 percent.
"Of the 75 American companies within the Fortune Global 200, only one doesn't have a female director," Natividad said. "What's more important is that 75 percent of these US companies have two or more women. That's key. They have gone beyond the token woman."
France, which ranked joint third with Germany on the Fortune listing, with 19 companies each, counted 22 women board members out of a total of 288, or a paltry 7.6 percent.
And often, women have only token representation on the boards of French companies.
"This low presence of women is surprising given France's success in pushing for women's equity at the parliamentary level. Clearly, women's advocacy has not yet reached the board room," said the report.
In Germany, women held 10.9 percent of board seats, but the vast majority were on the less powerful supervisory board, not the decision-making management board of a company.
Italian companies on the Fortune list brought up the rear in Europe, with women making up just 2.9 percent of corporate boards and not even figuring on the boards of three of the five companies that made it into the rankings.
Forty-five companies in the Fortune Global 200, including the Texas-based Plains All-American Pipeline, Germany's Daimler and a raft of Japanese household-name firms, have no women directors, the report shows.
"I have never said women are perfect creatures, but they do bring in a perspective that is very necessary to be competitive in the global economy," Natividad said, urging the world's large companies to do more to empower women.
"When this report was released two years ago, the CEO of Albertson told us he had a female-dominated board," Natividad said.
The company operates retail outlets, including supermarkets.
"He said: `No matter how good a man is, he cannot enter the mind of our base consumer as well as a woman can.'"
CROSS-STRAIT COLLABORATION: The new KMT chairwoman expressed interest in meeting the Chinese president from the start, but she’ll have to pay to get in Beijing allegedly agreed to let Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) around the Lunar New Year holiday next year on three conditions, including that the KMT block Taiwan’s arms purchases, a source said yesterday. Cheng has expressed interest in meeting Xi since she won the KMT’s chairmanship election in October. A source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a consensus on a meeting was allegedly reached after two KMT vice chairmen visited China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao (宋濤) in China last month. Beijing allegedly gave the KMT three conditions it had to
STAYING ALERT: China this week deployed its largest maritime show of force to date in the region, prompting concern in Taipei and Tokyo, which Beijing has brushed off Deterring conflict over Taiwan is a priority, the White House said in its National Security Strategy published yesterday, which also called on Japan and South Korea to increase their defense spending to help protect the first island chain. Taiwan is strategically positioned between Northeast and Southeast Asia, and provides direct access to the second island chain, with one-third of global shipping passing through the South China Sea, the report said. Given the implications for the US economy, along with Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors, “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority,” it said. However, the strategy also reiterated
‘BALANCE OF POWER’: Hegseth said that the US did not want to ‘strangle’ China, but to ensure that none of Washington’s allies would be vulnerable to military aggression Washington has no intention of changing the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Saturday, adding that one of the US military’s main priorities is to deter China “through strength, not through confrontation.” Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Hegseth outlined the US Department of Defense’s priorities under US President Donald Trump. “First, defending the US homeland and our hemisphere. Second, deterring China through strength, not confrontation. Third, increased burden sharing for us, allies and partners. And fourth, supercharging the US defense industrial base,” he said. US-China relations under
FRAUD ISSUES: The app meets none of Taiwan’s 15 cybersecurity standards, and in the past year, about 1,706 fraud cases have been identified on it The Ministry of the Interior yesterday ordered Taiwanese Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu (小紅書, also known as RedNote in English) for a year, after detecting hundreds of instances of fraud on the platform. The ISPs have been instructed to block access to the app to its more than 3 million users in Taiwan, effective immediately, Deputy Minister of the Interior Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元) told a news conference at the National Police Agency’s Fraud Prevention Center. The order is being implemented via protocols governing domain name system (DNS) response policy zones, he said. Xiaohongshu meets none
RSS