CEO of the JSE Nicky Newton-King may have just a small diversity problem. Eight of the 11 members of her executive committee are women. So is JSE chairman Nonkululeko Nyembezi-Heita (Newton-King, who started life as a lawyer, emphasises that the "man" in chairman is not a gender thing but rather derives from the Latin for hand, "manus").
Nor is it a gender story, the composition of the leadership team of the entity that is, arguably, at the heart of SA’s financial markets. At least not according to Newton-King, who is in her fourth year at the helm.
She doesn’t know why the JSE has so many women in senior posts (though she loves it). She suggests that it might be because the JSE is not just a job. It is "a hard-edged business in a hard-edged world", but it has a greater purpose, she says — and has attracted some extraordinary people in recent years who have a passion for what they do and want to make a difference.
She credits her predecessor, Russel Loubser, with putting two young women into senior management positions almost two decades ago — she herself, with three law degrees but no managerial experience, and Leanne Parsons, who heads up the JSE’s trading and market division.
Perhaps that got the JSE to a tipping point so that it attracted yet more women to senior posts. And they are in the "hard-edged" operational parts of the business — finance, technology, markets, strategy — where the men, interestingly, are mostly on the regulatory side of the JSE. There’s no doubt though that the profile of its exco — and indeed of its board, half of whose members are also women — makes it unique among JSE-listed companies, and pretty unusual among listed companies globally.
That should put the JSE right up there as a case study for the latest in the managerial literature.
There is a growing body of evidence on the "diversity dividend". Management gurus are not talking anymore about how fair and equitable it would be to have women in senior leadership positions but about how much of a competitive advantage it would confer.
Consultancy McKinsey talks about how in a deeply connected and global world, diversity makes sense in purely business terms. Its global survey of large public companies shows that gender-diverse companies were 15% more likely to outperform their peers financially — with the UK leg of the survey finding that each 10% increase in gender diversity went with a 3.5% increase in earnings before interest and tax (ebit).
A Credit Suisse global study of 2,400 public companies found that companies with at least one woman on the board outperformed in terms of share price those with no woman on the board over the six years to 2012.
Rather disturbingly, Credit Suisse found that about 40% of the companies in its survey had no women on the board.
Germany’s record was particularly poor — which may explain why it passed a law last week that requires some of Europe’s biggest companies to give 30% of supervisory seats to women from next year, in line with European Union guidelines.
Here, by contrast, well more than 90% of top companies have at least one woman on the board, according to Credit Suisse, and SA does relatively well in the global surveys, though there is still a very long way to go. Grant Thornton’s latest survey of women in business finds women occupying 27% of senior positions in SA. That compares to an average of only 23% in the European Union — but 32% in the Brics countries.
The JSE’s numbers put these to shame. And whatever it is doing, it seems to be working. The 2014 financial results, published last week, showed revenue up 13% and ebit up 22%, with costs up just 5.5%.
The JSE has embarked on a large capital investment programme and will spend more than R200m this year to upgrade and expand its infrastructure. Though it remains, for now, the "sole provider", it is developing new services and new products as it continues its efforts to stay close to its clients, and keep them "sticky" in the face of one or other form of competition.
Its share price has gained almost 50% over the past year and about 90% over five years.
So perhaps just another man or two?
Nor is it a gender story, the composition of the leadership team of the entity that is, arguably, at the heart of SA’s financial markets. At least not according to Newton-King, who is in her fourth year at the helm.
She doesn’t know why the JSE has so many women in senior posts (though she loves it). She suggests that it might be because the JSE is not just a job. It is "a hard-edged business in a hard-edged world", but it has a greater purpose, she says — and has attracted some extraordinary people in recent years who have a passion for what they do and want to make a difference.
She credits her predecessor, Russel Loubser, with putting two young women into senior management positions almost two decades ago — she herself, with three law degrees but no managerial experience, and Leanne Parsons, who heads up the JSE’s trading and market division.
Perhaps that got the JSE to a tipping point so that it attracted yet more women to senior posts. And they are in the "hard-edged" operational parts of the business — finance, technology, markets, strategy — where the men, interestingly, are mostly on the regulatory side of the JSE. There’s no doubt though that the profile of its exco — and indeed of its board, half of whose members are also women — makes it unique among JSE-listed companies, and pretty unusual among listed companies globally.
That should put the JSE right up there as a case study for the latest in the managerial literature.
There is a growing body of evidence on the "diversity dividend". Management gurus are not talking anymore about how fair and equitable it would be to have women in senior leadership positions but about how much of a competitive advantage it would confer.
Consultancy McKinsey talks about how in a deeply connected and global world, diversity makes sense in purely business terms. Its global survey of large public companies shows that gender-diverse companies were 15% more likely to outperform their peers financially — with the UK leg of the survey finding that each 10% increase in gender diversity went with a 3.5% increase in earnings before interest and tax (ebit).
A Credit Suisse global study of 2,400 public companies found that companies with at least one woman on the board outperformed in terms of share price those with no woman on the board over the six years to 2012.
Rather disturbingly, Credit Suisse found that about 40% of the companies in its survey had no women on the board.
Germany’s record was particularly poor — which may explain why it passed a law last week that requires some of Europe’s biggest companies to give 30% of supervisory seats to women from next year, in line with European Union guidelines.
Here, by contrast, well more than 90% of top companies have at least one woman on the board, according to Credit Suisse, and SA does relatively well in the global surveys, though there is still a very long way to go. Grant Thornton’s latest survey of women in business finds women occupying 27% of senior positions in SA. That compares to an average of only 23% in the European Union — but 32% in the Brics countries.
The JSE’s numbers put these to shame. And whatever it is doing, it seems to be working. The 2014 financial results, published last week, showed revenue up 13% and ebit up 22%, with costs up just 5.5%.
The JSE has embarked on a large capital investment programme and will spend more than R200m this year to upgrade and expand its infrastructure. Though it remains, for now, the "sole provider", it is developing new services and new products as it continues its efforts to stay close to its clients, and keep them "sticky" in the face of one or other form of competition.
Its share price has gained almost 50% over the past year and about 90% over five years.
So perhaps just another man or two?
http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2015/03/11/women-at-jse-make-the-case-for-diversity-dividend
