HRD Online spoke to Charlie Grubb, Senior Managing Director at Robert Half Executive Search UK, to find out his expert opinion on turning the DEI vision into reality at boardroom level.
While we are making strides when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), there is still clearly lots of progress to be made. And judging by the amount of controversial press coverage that this topic continues to receive, it’s quite obvious that the numbers aren’t adding up.
Breaking down the stereotypes that are still prevalent in the boardrooms of FTSE-100 companies has proven to be challenging. There is an alarming lack of women, although as one of our own female leaders points out, women “are less likely to put themselves forward”.
A significant proportion of these organisations still have no Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) representation on their boards. And what about the extremely low disabled employment rate? While it was always going to be difficult, given the apathy for cultural change within many organisations in certain sectors, we would have expected the picture to be a lot different than it is.
All the evidence points to the fact that DEI is good for business. Indeed, data from McKinsey found that executive teams that were made up of more than 30% women outperformed those with fewer or no females by 48%. And when it came to having more ethnically and culturally diverse boards, once again performance was the winner, to the tune of 36%. These numbers are quite staggering. The neuro-diverse and non-binary groups are other demographics that are also vastly under-represented.
This article was originally published on the HRD Online website. Click here to view the full article.
