This article first appeared in Corporate, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on April 18 - 24, 2016.

THERE is a well-known Chinese saying that “women hold up half the sky”, which can be traced back to Mao Zedong. Recognising the truth behind the saying and its benefit to the economy, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced in 2011 that Malaysia aimed to raise the number of women in decision-making positions to 30% by 2016.

The public sector has succeeded in meeting his target, with 37% of its top management (Jusa C and above) being women as at last month, says Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Azalina Othman Said.

Corporate Malaysia, however, is falling woefully short of the government’s target.

At Malaysia’s top 100 listed companies, another 130 women need to be hired in order to attain that 30% goal, the prime minister announced at the Invest Malaysia conference last Tuesday. It is understood that this means there is a need to at least double the existing number of women in these boardrooms.

The state of affairs in the rest of Corporate Malaysia will become apparent from this year as it is now mandatory for all public listed companies to disclose the gender representation of their board and key senior management in their annual reports.

As it is, women make up only a dismal 5% of CEOs and 13% of directors in the boardrooms, according to a TalentCorp-PwC survey of 130 companies in Malaysia last year. Gender composition becomes more even as one travels down the organisational structure — 22% of women hold top management positions, 40% hold senior and mid-management roles and 52% have executive spots.

The numbers on women participation in the boards of public listed companies are particularly telling.

Data from Bursa Malaysia reveals that in 2015, women’s share of the boardrooms at the exchange’s largest 100 companies by market capitalisation stood at only 14%. Only seven of these companies met the government’s 30% target while 27 companies have no female board member at all. Across the exchange, just 10.7% or 702 people in the boardrooms are women. Over an eight-year period, the figure represents a trifling compound annual growth rate of 3.29%.

Malaysia, though, appears to fare better than some advanced economies in the region. Female participation in boardrooms in Hong Kong and Singapore stood at 9.6% and 8.8% respectively in 2014.

The low level of female participation in Malaysia is despite considerable government spending on programmes and institutions to prepare women for boardroom and management roles.

In 2015, the government allocated RM4.63 million to the NAM Institute for the Empowerment of Women (NIEW), which conducts the Women Directors’ Programme (WDP) to “prepare potential and qualified women to fully understand the responsibilities associated with effective board directorship”. This year, the allocation for NIEW has been reduced to RM3.09 million but a separate RM1.4 million has been provided specifically for the implementation of WDP.

Last year, Talent Corp Malaysia Bhd (TalentCorp) launched a Career Comeback Grant to encourage employers to recruit and retain women returning from career breaks. Employers that implement or enhance a programme to recruit women, who have left the workforce for at least six months due to reasons related to family commitment, work-life balance, personal growth or compulsory exit, can receive a grant of up to RM100,000. This is likely funded by the RM76.2 million allocated to TalentCorp by the Prime Minister’s Department.

The success of such government initiatives is hard to gauge. According to the 2014 NIEW annual report, 13% of women on the boards of public listed companies in 2013 were WDP alumni. It is unclear, though, if those appointments happened post-WDP training. In any event, observers say government targets and training programmes such as WDP, which are aimed at addressing the symptoms and not the fundamental causes of the lack of women participation at the top, will see limited success because barriers of entry to management and boardrooms for women have not been removed.

In a 2012 study by McKinsey & Company called “Women Matter: An Asian Perspective”, respondents say the top three high-level barriers to increasing gender diversity at top managements of corporations are the “double burden syndrome” of women balancing work and domestic responsibilities, work models that require availability and geographical mobility at all times, and the lack of pro-family public policies or support services. Other dominant factors are women’s reluctance to promote themselves, the absence of female role models and the tendency of women to network less effectively than men.

Removing these barriers would require a “change in the corporate ecosystem” to become more sensitive to women’s priorities, says Tan Siok Choo, chairperson of United Malacca Bhd. She points out that helpful and practical measures, such as the provision of childcare facilities at workplace, allowing flexible work arrangements and extending equal pay and medical benefits to all employees, are still sorely lacking in Corporate Malaysia today.

Sunita Rajakumar, who sits on the board of several public listed companies including Hibiscus Petroleum Bhd and Hai-O Enterprise Bhd, tells The Edge, “There should be an increased emphasis on helping women stay on in the workplace — making it easier for them to juggle their other non-work priorities and achieve a satisfactory work-life balance, helping them to be psychologically ready to accept more recognition and responsibility [and providing them with] structured training and networking opportunities, which have been carefully and specifically designed for them.”

McKinsey says corporations that fail to do so risk surrendering two key sources of competitive advantage of “having the best talent in an age of talent scarcity and capitalising on the particular performance benefits that women in leadership positions bring to an organisation”.

It has found that some companies feel the need to hire more women so as to sustain good relationships with female clients or because they want more female insight into consumer buying patterns.

Meanwhile, DiGi.Com Bhd, which has just implemented a company-wide six-month paid maternity leave policy, believes a work culture that is understanding of women’s priorities attracts and retains talent, and a diverse workplace boosts organisational innovation and performance.

There is also a business case to boosting female participation at the top. The McKinsey study reveals that companies with the highest proportion of women on their executive committees performed better in terms of return on equity and earnings margins than those that had no women at that level. Similarly, a 2016 research by Peterson Institute for International Economics of 21,980 companies across 91 countries found that the presence of more female leaders in top positions of corporate management correlates with increased profitability at these companies.

There is no shortage of reasons for pushing women to the top of corporations in Malaysia. However, as the 2016 deadline looms, corporations will have to do a lot more to meet that 30% target.

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