One of the most enduring weak points of corporate SA is the lack of female CEOs in prominent companies. The JSE, where the big guns play at capitalism in the glare of the public eye, reflects a paucity of female leadership across the board.
In a 2020 report on executive directors, PwC says that 19 JSE CEOs are women — just 6% of all CEOs.
Including women at executive director level, the representation rises to 14%. In a country where women outnumber men, this is an indictment of SA’s ability to create opportunities for women to run large companies. Even more disturbingly, PwC reports that trying to establish whether a gender pay gap exists at CEO level would be meaningless when the sample of women is so small.
The issues relating to diversity in leadership are as old as capitalism itself. Historically, one might say that the labour force participation of women, plus the prevalence of opportunities given to men by virtue of structures both political and religious, gave men a 100-year head start. That, however, needs to be contrasted against the recent changes in those variables. Across the world many more women are at work, and many more women are educated than ever before.
Naturally, some countries have done better than others in enabling access and opportunities for women in business. But the success of these initiatives needs to eventually translate into tangible outcomes — CEO roles being one of them. In the SA context, where these issues are prevalent across race and gender, putting in place mechanisms to facilitate narrowing the gap is a fundamental social need.
The various mechanisms, from transformative legislation to moral suasion, need to start delivering outcomes for this demographic dividend to be unleashed. As things stand, there are far too few examples of women gaining access and opportunity that translates to substantive executive responsibility. So, when one female CEO disappears from the calculation everyone notices.
Grit CEO Bronwyn Corbett recently announced that her company would be delisting from the JSE. The reason cited was the cost burden associated with being listed across three exchanges: Johannesburg, Mauritius and London. Perhaps one of the few remaining female CEOs of a listed company in SA, Leila Fourie, who runs the JSE, needs to pay some attention to this.
Listing burdens
The JSE has seen its number of listings declining over the years. In 2001, the JSE had 601 listed companies; today that number is about 340. The reasons for the delistings vary from consolidations to shifting strategies to business extinction. However, the question of whether the costs of remaining listed exceed the benefits remains important. No-one doubts that listing on an exchange provides a much wider investor audience with the funds to invest in a company.
Equally, no-one can doubt that the investment decision is linked to the faith placed in the exchange itself. Investors readily assume that by the time a company is listed many of the dull compliance and governance matters have been vetted by the exchange. This puts the burden on the exchange to ensure that those it lists are companies it can vouch for.
And that is where the tension between practical and onerous disclosures comes in.
Two years ago, Old Mutual’s listing statement relating to its unbundling was more than 550 pages. That may well provide comprehensive insights to prospective investors, but if it burdens the company and investors with too much detail that no-one reads, its relevance diminishes with every additional page.
As companies transition towards a world that is changing, there will be casualties from the listed space. We just need to ensure that none is created by the exchanges themselves, to the detriment of public investors who lose access to companies worth investing in.
• Sithole is an accountant, academic and activist.
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