Sarah O’Connor: Boards can deliver change for the better

Board composition has been a topic of conversation in the commercial world for some time. 

In business, it has long been accepted that a diversity of skills and experience among a company’s directors is essential to enable the board fulfil its function of ensuring an organisation’s prosperity by establishing the strategic direction, safeguarding the best interests of its shareholders and other stakeholders and ensuring compliance with all applicable regulations.

More recently the meaning of diversity has extended to include gender and other considerations such as background and ethnicity for example, initiatives such as the 30% club. Established in the UK in 2010 with the objective of ensuring that a third of the boards of FTSE100 companies would be female. At the time only 12.5% of directors were female but this has since increased to 27.5%.