The most empowered companies... but where are the women?

Top Empowerment Companies (TEC) – a new annual special issue launched by Financial Mail last week in partnership with Empowerdex – has named Telkom the most empowered of SA's listed companies.

TEC is based on research on all listed companies. The research was undertaken in partnership with empowerment rating agency Empowerdex. Each company was given an estimated empowerment score based on the Department of Trade & Industry's balanced empowerment scorecard. The scorecard uses seven different factors to calculate a final score – ownership, management, employment equity, skills development, affirmative procurement, enterprise development and social development. Those numbers have been analysed to develop rankings of the top 200 most empowered listed companies.

Telkom achieved its top ranking with a strong showing in all seven empowerment factors, earning it a final score of 69,78 out of a maximum of 100. Second place went to diversified industrial company Sekunjalo which has fishing, medical and financial interests, with a combined score of 63,4. Sekunjalo scored strongly in management, ownership and affirmative procurement. Third place was taken by telecommunications company MTN, which scored well on management, ownership and employment equity.

FM editor Caroline Southey commented: "Black economic empowerment will dominate the corporate agenda for the foreseeable future. To date there has been a lack of information in the public domain about the true empowerment status of SA's major companies. TEC is the first major undertaking to address that need."

Gender empowerment

It's wonderful that the most empowered companies are being showcased in this way, but shocking when you delve deeper and discover that white or black, you can practically count the number of female CEO's and directors of SA's listed companies on one hand!

On the same day as the FM launch, the Business Women's Association of South Africa (BWA) launched its Nedbank-sponsored Catalyst census into South African Women in Corporate Leadership, finding that only 7.1% of all directors in the country are women. As a result of collaboration between BWA and Catalyst, a leading businesswomen's organisation in the US, this census measured, for the first time ever, the number of women on boards and in executive management of every company listed on the JSE, as well as 17 of the largest state-owned enterprises in SA. The census was conducted locally also by EmpowerDEX and BWA.

While women make up 52% of the adult population in South Africa, they make up only 41% of the working population and constitute only 14.7% of all executive managers. Census data shows that of the 3 125 directorship positions held, only 221 are held by women. Only 11 women hold chairs of boards out of a total of 364 and there are only seven female CEOs/MDs, in comparison to 357 men.

Despite these figures and the fact that SA performs the lowest out of four countries in the study, including the US, Canada and Australia, we actually compare well globally, since the international average shows that only one percent of all CEO positions are held by women.

This is simply not good enough, according the to BWA, which says Government has set benchmarks with the strong appointment of women in Government and across the public sector, and that this is a clear indication that the private sector must knock down the stiletto ceiling and follow suit.

"While there will always be more people in an overall workforce than in corporate leadership positions, the relative representation of women in executive management and board positions does not correspond meaningfully to the proportion that women form of the overall (working) population of the country," explained Dr Namane Magau, BWA President.

The following 10 SA companies that had performed well, where 25 percent or more director positions were held by women and 25 percent or more of executive manager positions were held by women, are:
1. Air Traffic & Navigation Services.
2. Enviroserv Holdings
3. Maxtec
4. MTN Group
5. SABC
6. SA Post Office
7. Spescom
8. Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority
9. Transnet
10. Venter Leisure & Commercial Trailers

Their performance is in sharp contrast to the fact that almost 60 percent of all companies surveyed have no women directors at all - and in fact, state-owned enterprises outperform JSE-listed companies by a significant margin.

"Clearly South Africa faces many challenges, but there is a significant opportunity for corporate SA to use the results of the census to re-evaluate the degree to which they are (or not) capitalizing on as large a pool of talent as possible and for women to make informed choices about which companies they wish to work for," concluded Dr Magau.