A fearless girl has emerged on Wall Street in New York City on International Women’s Day. She stares down the rampaging bull, and symbolises the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards, and the pay gap of women in financial services.

International Women’s Day is always a great time to reflect on the rights of women, celebrate diversity, and bring about gender parity. One measure of equality that is reflected on this time of year is the number of women in senior leadership positions.

When looking at what the Fearless Girl faces, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency has some interesting statistics. The male/female role split in Financial Services is almost 50-50… but as roles move higher within an organisation, the percentage of women represented dwindles. Their study suggests women represent less than ¼ of executives and general managers, key management personnel, and only 5.3% of CEOs or business heads.

But it’s not just financial services with an abysmal track record… the AICD produces quarterly reports which look at the number of women appointed to ASX 200 Boards. They’ve set a target of achieving 30% representation on ASX 200 Boards by 2018. At this stage, we are tracking at around 25%, which is good. But this too could be better. There are currently around 20 companies in the ASX 200 with no female directors. Credit Suisse has completed a comprehensive study which highlights that greater diversity at the Board level is directly linked to company performance.

Ways to improve the statistics in some countries is via quotas. In Australia we have targets. In the UK and Finland, they prefer to publically shame companies with no female representation. For your interest, here are some of Australia’s least diverse boards…

ARB Corporation Ltd

Mesoblast

Austal Ltd

Mineral Resources Ltd

Australian Agricultural Co Ltd

National Storage REIT

Evolution Mining

Northern Star Resources

Flight Centre

QUBE Holdings

Investa Office fund

Reliance Worldwide

TPG