New Group Aims to Increase Number of Women in Management

A group of about two dozen chief executives and board chairmen of major companies, along with the billionaire investor Warren Buffett, are joining together to push American companies to voluntarily bolster the number of women in company management, especially senior leadership.

The effort, called the 30% Club, is being announced on Tuesday and is an expansion of an effort in Britain to reshape board compositions. The group is urging American businesses to adopt measures to insure that women are better represented throughout company ranks. They argue that this would improve business performance.

“Real progress can be made if this is looked at as a business issue rather than one of gender or diversity,” said Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton Capital Management, who founded the 30% Club four years ago to urge the 100 largest companies in Britain to increase the number of women on their boards to nearly one-third of all directors by 2015.

The 30% Club effort in the United States â€" which has yet to set a percentage goal for women in leadership positions â€" hopes to “develop a pipeline of female talent in American organizations to put women in visible positions for advancement,” Ms. Morrissey said. The group does not want to focus solely on corporate board membership.

“It’s not just a nice thing to do, but it’s fundamental to business priorities,” said John Veihmeyer, global chairman of KPMG and a 30% Club backer, who noted that the research group Catalyst had found that companies perform better financially with higher numbers of women on their boards.

“We are focusing on the longer term to build diversity into leadership ranks,” he said.

When the 30% Club began in 2010, women represented just 12.5 percent of directors on the boards of top British companies. At the time, European countries were adopting laws requiring quotas to assure board diversity. As of March 2014, the 92 British companies that are participating say they have raised the percentage to 20.8 percent female directors.

Even though the effort in the United States has broad leadership goals, female board membership at American companies has stagnated for more than a decade at around 17 percent, according to the latest research from Catalyst and there is no pressure from the government or Congress to make board composition more inclusive.

Even so, Dominic Barton, the global managing director of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm, and a member of the 30% Club, said, “You can’t ignore women if a company wants to claim it has the best talent in the world.”

He added, in a telephone interview: “It’s a long process, and the way to help solve it is to look at the recruiting pipeline which funnels people to the managerial level. Companies need to make sure they retain women at that level.”

He said that McKinsey is actively trying to increase the percentage of women from 25 percent of its approximately 10,000 professional staff. The goal, he said, is to double the percentage of women in each region.