Equal opportunities
Minister praises ACCA
29 Jun 2008
The Rt Hon Theresa May MP, the UK's Shadow Minister for Women, has praised ACCA in a debate at its London headquarters on the issues surrounding the corporate reporting of women.
May was speaking at an event to mark research into the comparative performance of UK, US and Australian companies, undertaken by Nottingham University Business School academics, Kate Grosser and Jeremy Moon, and La Trobe University, Melbourne professor, Carol Adams.
She was impressed that ACCA has 42% women members and over 50% women students, making a total of well over 200,000 female accountants, and said that the ACCA report, Public Reporting of Equal Opportunity for Women, to be published in September 2008, would make an important contribution to the debate on equality issues.
She outlined three key reasons why companies should push ahead with such reporting, which would in turn drive better performance:
- high calibre graduates increasingly insist on working for companies that adopt a good work-life balance. These employers of choice enjoyed a competitive advantage in recruitment
- on retention, the UK building society Nationwide benefited from a 91% maternity return rate by adopting such practices, and
- studies by McKinsey and the University of Helsinki has shown consistently good performance by companies with a high proportion of female executives. Companies should therefore treat this as a genuine business performance issue, not one of box-ticking.