Catherine Noone (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In the context of the budget, there has been a lot of talk of stimuli and incentives for various sectors. This morning I heard about a report from Europe on the membership of boards, particularly the female membership of boards.

There might be a necessity for some sort of incentive or for some measure to encourage boards to have a greater proportion of women on them. I am not somebody who flies the gender equality flag and, traditionally, I was not a fan of quotas, but there clearly is a problem because only 15.8% of board members of the largest companies in the 27 EU member states are women. Ireland is below average and the percentage is growing at a much slower rate than in other states, so it is clear some sort of intervention may be required.

In addition, there are many economic advantages. According to a Credit Suisse report, which I read when researching this, companies with at least one woman on their board have outperformed the stocks of companies with no women on their boards by 26% over the past six years. Women also control 70% of global consumer spending decisions, so there would be advantages to having boards mirror the market. The European Commission is considering proposals to introduce gender quotas on boards of up to 40% by 2020. While I am not a huge fan of gender quotas, we should certainly look at this area in an effort to improve our ratings.