Speech to: The National Council of Women of New Zealand

Greetings, it is a pleasure to be here to open to new premises of the National Council of Women of New Zealand.

The Council has been contributing to women’s progress for 115 years. Their service to women, the family and the community at local, national and international levels through advocacy, research, and action has been extremely valuable.

I would like to start by talking about the Government’s vision for New Zealand. That is to build a strong economy and a society that enables all New Zealanders to reach their personal goals and dreams.

The role of women in New Zealand is critical to achieving that vision. Women are major contributors to both economy and society. The largest single contribution in the last 30 years has come from women’s increased labour market participation – but we are still far from fully harnessing women’s economic potential.

Currently, in the top 100 New Zealand companies only 9.3 percent of directors are women.

Women make up 64% of our tertiary graduates, yet women are hugely under-represented on the boards and in senior management role. This means our workforce are missing out the economic benefits that greater participation and use of available skills could bring.

I have just returned from a two day trip to Sydney where I met with some of Australia's top business leaders – including Chair of the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) David Gonski, the CEO and Managing Director of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) Sir Ralph Norris, Co-CEO and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs Stephen Fitzgerald - to discuss how Australia has managed to significantly boost the number of women on private sector boards.

Women’s participation on ASX 200 boards has reached 11.7 percent, a 600 percent increase in new appointments in just one year! Women are expected to hold 17 percent of the Australian Stock Exchange's 200 board roles by the end of 2011.

This incredible achievement has come about as a result of a mix of initiatives from a range of stakeholders. The result has been a groundswell of support for gender diversity in business and a real and appreciable cultural change.

Diversity in corporate governance is now seen as a 'game-changer' by leading businessmen and businesses - it adds to their public profile and raises their brand. For example, the ASX Corporate Governance Council has introduced a new gender diversity guidelines, those guidelines have raised the ASX's leadership brand.

Another common theme from our meetings was that raising the quality of corporate governance should be owned and led by the business sector. Senior executives must be involved in addressing and leading matters relating to gender diversity.

We spoke to leaders of companies which are setting targets for female involvement on boards and in senior management.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, for example, has set a target that 35% of senior managers will be women by 2015.

It was a common theme that companies have targeted 'unconscious bias' in their organisations, and are addressing this with targeted management training, and the establishment of oversight panels on remuneration matters to address gender pay gap issues.

Australia also have established a Male Champions of Change programme, which is made up of 12 leading businessmen, including the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as well as the CEOs of Qantas, IBM, Telstra and Woolworths.

These high-powered men champion gender diversity and readily speak on this topic to media and at events. The group has been so successful and has attained such a profile that there is now a waiting list of male business leaders wishing to join!

I also met with the Australian Institute of Company Directors which has established a mentoring programme of high-calibre female candidates for boards. The AICD ran their inaugural mentoring programme in 2010 attracting the participation of 56 of the top 200 ASX Board chairs and matched to 64 successful women applicants to the programme. This year the programme involves 80 top Australian Chairmen and 84 women mentees. The programme has been effective in giving visibility to meritorious, competent, female candidates for board appointment.

This is not a social issue it is an economic issue. Here in New Zealand we have got a lot of work to do. Over the coming weeks I will be meeting with Members of Parliament and business leaders to discuss how we can get more diversity on our boards and improve productivity and bring about the step change in the New Zealand economy we all want.

Thank you.