The Guardian has recently reported that women are in the minority at board level in FTSE listed organisations, and that the Government is now calling for large corporations to make sure that 25% of their board members are female by 2015.
However, this may not be as simple as the Government suggests. Even given the recent changes instituted by the Equality Act, positive discrimination in the workplace is not lawful, which means that women cannot be appointed to board positions over a man simply because women are not fairly represented in such roles.
While a woman can be promoted over a man if the two are equally matched, employers are not legally entitled to put in a place a policy of positive action in order to fulfil a "quota" of female board members.
Employers who seek to heed the Government's call and increase the level of female representation at board level will thus have to be very careful how they go about this in order to avoid claims of sex discrimination.
Unless the law is changed in future to allow for positive discrimination on grounds of gender, employers will have to ensure that they promote individual females based solely on their merits and not because of outside pressure to increase the number of women in executive roles.
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