Ms Gillian Harford:

One of the tenants of the 30% Club is always focusing on changing the system, rather than feeling that we always have to change the women. In addition to the great work that Ms Duffy does in training, we encourage senior women to make themselves available for comment. However, there is an onus on the media outlets to support the women being commented on in terms of the content that they present, rather than how they are dressed or their accents. We really see women being more likely to step up, which might partially answer the Deputy's question, when they see the media outlets acting as allies for women as expert speakers, rather than as tokenism. As I said, when you see somebody stepping out of their comfort zone and commenting on sport, for example, and being criticised on social media for their accent, it is great when the media outlet itself steps up and says it supports them as an expert. That encourages more women to get involved.

On the Deputy's point about women at executive level, we would support her view absolutely. Our concern is that countries that have focused on quotas, and quotas on boards have not done anything at all to improve the lot. That is why, within the 30% Club, we like to go on the basis of targets. Organisations that are accountable for targets almost have no choice but to look at executive level, because that is what they need to feed the pipeline. When the 30% Club started in the UK in 2010, it only focused on boards and many of the chapters around the world did the same. When it came to Ireland in 2015, we saw that as a serious gap, mainly because we have a small number of listed boards. We extended the remit in Ireland and said we wanted to focus on a minimum of 30% at C-suite as well. The 30% Club globally has now retrofitted that into its initiative, but it has seen where we have focused on it in Ireland. It is absolutely the way to go. Decisions on governance and oversight are made at board level, but the critical strategic decisions, the culture of an organisation and the diversity approach in terms of customers, employees and procurement and wider stakeholders happen at the C-suite table. We believe it is really important that women are equally represented. It is more important that they are represented at that table. That is what we work with Irish organisations to encourage.