The Professional Women Roundtable (PWR) has advocated for gender diversity on board seats as this will help many Nigerian companies maximise financial returns and meet with global standards.
According to the IMF, gender parity has a significant impact on economic development in any society.
At a corporate level, Mckinsey found that African companies with at least 25% female representation on their boards, had a 20% higher than industry average earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margin.
The Professional Women Roundtable (PWR) is a female leadership/career development and gender diversity consulting firm operating across Africa.
The PWR recently released a report on NSE Top 20 Gender Diversity Scorecard for 2020. The primary highlight of this scorecard centred on female representation on the board of the top 20 companies by market capitalisation on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.
The scorecard which was developed with the kind support of Avivah Wittenbery-Cox, CEO of 20-First, UK sourced current data from company’s annual report, company’s website, as well as the NSE website.
The report shows that out of the 230 board seats in total, only 48 seats are held by women (20.9 percent) and 182 seats are held by men (79.1 percent).
The report also highlighted that out of the 20 boards; only three are chaired by women. These companies are Access Bank, Union Bank and Guaranteed Trust Bank.
The five companies that ranked the highest in terms of percentage of board seats held by women are Access Bank (42.9 percent), Stanbic IBTC Holdings (40 percent), Larfarge Cement Wapco (36.4 percent), Union Bank of Nigeria (30.8 percent), Nigerian Breweries (30 percent) and FBN Holdings (30 percent).
Five companies that ranked the least in terms of female representation are Dangote Cement (14.3 percent), Nestle Nigeria (14.3 percent), MTN Nigeria Communication (13.3 percent), Zenith Bank (7.7 percent) and Flour mills (7.7 percent). Notore Chemical Industries has no female board representation as shown by the report. The PWR report also show Female representation in board seats by sector, the financial services sector and the consumer goods sector has the highest female participation with respect to number of board seats held by women.
The Financial service sector records 25.53 percent female representation while Consumer goods sector has 20 percent female representation. The least female board representations according to sector are in the industrial goods sector with 15.38 percent representation, and the ICT and oil and gas sector which has 15.79 percent and 16.67 percent female representations respectively.
50 percent of the banks in the NSE Top 20 have least 30% female board representation and 37.5 percent of the boards in the financial service sectors are chaired by women as revealed by the report.
The research also discovered that the Consumer goods, Industrial good, ICT and Oil/Gas sectors have none of the boards chaired by women.
The PWR has stated that the scoreboard would be released annually to track progress and support such forward looking businesses.
