Women at the Top: Never Mind the Quotas, Develop the Pipeline

Gender diversity in the boardroom has its advantages but there is no business case for female quotas, says Renée Adams, a professor and Commonwealth Bank (CBA) Chair in Finance at the Australian School of Business. Too much emphasis on placing women at the top obscures the systemic difficulties many women face in pursuing and maintaining full-time careers. Policy-makers should concentrate on working from the bottom up to build a talent pipeline. Carolyn Kay, a non-executive director at CBA, sees progress being made in female representation but says more needs to be done, noting that “we are still losing women at senior levels”.