Community Business reports drop in women on HK HSI boards

Community Business has reported a ‘disappointing’ year-on-year drop in female representation on Hong Kong company boards. Women on boards of Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index (HSI) dropped from 13.9% to 13.6%, ‘for the first time’ since the non-profit organisation started to publish the data in 2009.

Although 39 of the 50 companies quoted on the HSI have at least one female director, only 16 boards have female executive directors, and just one company has a female CEO. Surprisingly, 11 firms still have all-male boards, and six of those have never had a woman on its board to date.

“While other leading economies across the world have embraced the business case for gender-diverse representation at senior levels, Hong Kong continues to ignore calls to improve female representation at leadership levels,” pointed out Community Business. 

‘PALTRY’ REPRESENTATON

Female appointments represented a ‘paltry’ 8% of all appointments during 2019. “Disappointingly, for the second year in a row, we saw only six female appointments to HSI boards, while 65 men were appointed,” said the non-profit. 

This stagnation and the “repeated dismissal of this issue by Hong Kong’s business community is very concerning”, added Community Business. “In recent years, we have seen a small minority of enlightened Hong Kong listed companies take concrete actions to rectify their gender-homogeneous board makeup. The majority have resisted or paid mere lip-service to the issue by appointing a token woman, before returning to business as usual and a candidate pool taken from ‘the old boys club’.”

Shirley Syaru Lin was the only female appointment made in the final quarter of 2019. She was appointed to the Swire Pacific board, replacing Mary Xuezheng Ma who passed away last year.

QUESTIONING QUOTAS

Despite the business benefits of diverse boards, as confirmed by Goldman Sachs CEO, ‘Hong Kong companies are not changing their ways’, noted Community Business. Goldman Sachs ruling to increase diversity on boards announced yesterday, however will not apply to Asia, where all male boards are still common.

“Nowadays there’s no excuse for companies to have non-diverse, all-male boards,” said Fern Ngai, CEO of Community Business, Goldman “should include Asia. I don’t see why they don’t.”

The non-profit is questioning whether it’s time to introduce mandatory quotas: “A mandated quota has proven to be an effective catalyst in other markets, and while we are hesitant to promote a measure that could undermine truly meritocratic appointments, it might be just the wake-up call that Hong Kong companies need.”

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