The ABC, in its limitless Woke fashion, decided recently that the time is again ripe to take the old ‘corporate board diversity’ nag out for another gallop around the ‘diversity’ track where we learn, as if the steed hasn’t already been flogged to within an inch of its ‘inclusivity’ life, that women and ‘First Nations people, culturally diverse Australians, and people with a disability’ are being dudded everywhere by white, able-bodied men – including in the top echelons of business.
The Governance Institute of Australia (a weighty conglomeration of some 8,000 members from corporate Australia) spoke with the ABC recently to air the shocking (to the Institute and the ABC) lack of holy Equality as revealed by an April 2024 report on board diversity across Australia’s top 300 ASX-listed companies.
Although they concede that there has been, since 2015, an 89 per cent increase in the number of board positions held by women, this only gets them up to 36 per cent of all board possies whilst 13 of the boards have no female directors at all. Elsewhere, diversity is going nowhere, with the ‘culturally diverse’ (by which they mean non-Anglo) being elbowed aside by the 91 per cent of directors with an Anglo-Celtic background. The report also could scrape up only four ‘First Nations’ directors, four who were openly LGBTQI+ (Woodside Energy tops the rainbow ladder with around 9 per cent LGBTQ+ on its board) and not a single director with a disability.
Piling on the grim DEI news, the report laments that stale, pale, male directors are consolidating their undiverse grip on things with a ‘significant decline in the percentage of younger directors under 50’ whilst the average age of directors is a positively pensionable 61 with tenures of twenty years and beyond rising to 7.8 per cent of all positions. Young, vigorous, and more ‘diverse’ board candidates are being stymied by an ‘old boys club’, we are warned.
The report does concede that there may actually be greater representation of minorities on boards than their survey is picking up but even this ‘positive’ news is given a negative twist because many of the undetected ‘diverse’ are remaining in the shadows because there are still ‘cultural issues in admitting difference’. This seems a bit of a long bow, however, what with the virtually mandatory public celebration of multi-Woke brilliance.
All of this is terrible news, the report elaborates, because ‘different approaches’ to decision-making provided by ‘diversity’ opens up ‘more avenues to analyse problems and reach stronger resolutions’ although why a director, or anyone else, should possess more creativity and insight courtesy of their chromosomes or skin pigmentation or other mere biological factors is nowhere spelt out other than these individuals are gifted with special powers derived from having it so tough in regular life outside the boardroom that this fosters lateral thinking where they learn innovative ‘problem-solving skills in their everyday lives’.
This argument is a cut above the go-to Woke argument that the ‘marginalised’ have access to ‘special forms of knowledge’ but it devalues the fact that people of all sorts, even straight, ‘heteronormative’ white guys, often have their own personal challenges that require creativity, determination, and application to manage and overcome whilst it is not axiomatic that personal ‘suffering’ is a prerequisite for producing neither great art nor a winning business plan.
The cost to Australia’s top companies of all this monochromatic board membership is, say the professional ‘diversity’ cheer squad, is an unhealthier bottom line because the companies they steward are missing out on the ‘war for talent’ because of hidebound sexism, ethnocentrism, and ‘ableism’ even though the ASX itself has a formulated diversity and inclusion policy, as do many ASX300-listed companies (of course they do because the business world is insufferably Woke).
The Australian Financial Review, for example, claims that there is ‘growing pressure from customers and investors to improve their workforce and leadership diversity given the benefits this often brings to companies’ bottom lines. Or not – who amongst the customers and investors of the top companies really gives a tinkers about the diversity representation on boards compared to receiving the practical benefits from a sound business model effectively and efficiently delivered…?
That ‘diversity’ will make more money for a company is usually simply asserted and not at all obvious – an all-women, all ethnic, all disabled, all LGBTQA board that self-congratulatedly navel-gazes whilst pumping out disastrous Bud Light-style advertising is likely to do worse for a company’s bottom line than a board of beer-drinking, football-watching men who know their business and their customer base.
Yet ‘diversity’ shows no signs of fading away because it is, for the corporate class and for politicians in thrall to the Woke zeitgeist, a wonderful distraction from more pressing, and real, workplace issues such as good wages and job security for Australian workers which is far more likely to produce happy campers who are loyal to a company.
With productivity in Australia dawdling, one of the last things needed is fripperies like DEI, whether that is obsessing over board diversity or forcing employees to attend DEI ‘re-education’ sessions, on pain of reprimand or dismissal or social ostracism, where they must to sit through sessions denouncing whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, unconscious bias or whatever the fashionable anti-Woke sin of the day is, all whilst giving a hiring and promotion leg-up to less qualified diversity hires who are, in the process of such ‘affirmative action’, condescendingly told that they only got the plum gig because of their identity and not ability and who may go on to find themselves out of their depth thus creating extra workload, resentment, and de-motivation amongst more competent employees. But we are in an era where ‘diversity’ trumps merit, so we get stuck with this field of woke unfairness which drags on company bottom lines.
Rabbiting on about side-issues like board diversity is not going to address such fundamental factors as productivity, and employee engagement, performance and creativity, and, ultimately, profitability. There is, rather, a need to do something about the 74 per cent of employees who say that ‘now is a good time to look for a new position’ whilst only 25 per cent of workers report feeling engaged or committed to their company’s goals with half (48 per cent) of Australian workers reporting they experience a lot of stress according to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2024 report also just released.
High rates of perceived bullying or harassment also loom large in these surveys of employee (dis)satisfaction but these are rarely the result of a psychopathic boss or a ‘toxic’ workplace, coming, rather, from the pressures of working in an under-resourced environment where job dissatisfaction, disengagement and burnout are rife (in a separate survey, 87 per cent reported burnout in the past 12 months) and who would love to see a board of directors promoting a better work-life balance, more flexible working arrangements and hiring more staff.
Rather than looking at how the spoils of high corporate life are divvied up according to identity politics commandments, perhaps Australia’s corporate boards should reflect on how the fish rots from the head and how well-remunerated board members’ obsession with Woke worrying about diversity is part of the problem.