Gender Balance: Survey Shows Nigeria Beats World Average in Corporate Board Composition
Good corporate governance improves performance, drives growth, mitigate risks, attract, and retain investors and ultimately averts financial crisis. To be truly effective, management boards require a diversity of skills, cultures, and views to make smart decisions with lasting impact.
Corporate governance is more than just putting together a team of men and women to run the affairs of an organization. Corporate governance brings together sound minds with varied backgrounds, experiences, and skills.
Within corporate institutions in Africa and globally, there has been a lot of focus on improving the gender balance on management boards and staff of organizations. For financial institutions in Nigeria, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has been quite deliberate in creating policies that have reduced the
gender gap over time. The CBN recommends that banks allocate at least 30% of board seats to women.
Positively, this continues to improve in Nigeria as more women are taking up leadership and management positions.
Current research has indicated that at least 1 in 5 board members of Nigeria’s top companies are female which is well above the world average of 17% for female representation on boards. Likewise, according to a survey published by the Professional Women Roundtable, a Lagos-based gender diversity consulting firm, three of the top 20 most-capitalized firms in Nigeria have a woman as chairperson of the board. Nigerian banks have the most women on their boards or at least a quarter of their board positions.
Furthermore, studies have shown that with one in four board positions taken by women, Africa generally has the highest proportion of women on boards, beating second-placed Europe at 23% and global laggard Latin America at 7%, the McKinsey Global Institute reported in 2019. While Nigeria may rank slightly below other African nations such as Botswana and Kenya, a survey shows that Nigeria is well ranked at 21%.