Only four out of Western Australia's top 20 companies currently meet a gender target set by the Australian Institute of Company Directors, which wants women to fill 30 per cent of board positions on S&P/ASX 200 companies within three years.
Only four out of Western Australia's top 20 companies currently meet a gender target set by the Australian Institute of Company Directors, which wants women to fill 30 per cent of board positions on S&P/ASX 200 companies within three years.
Wesfarmers, Fortescue Metals Group, Navitas and Liquefied Natural Gas are the only Perth-based companies in the S&P/ASX 200 index that meet the 30 per cent target today.
The Wesfarmers board includes Transfield Services chairman Diane Smith-Gander.
Among the 20 WA companies in the S&P/ASX 200 index, women fill 23 out of 146 board positions - or 15.7 per cent of the total.
That percentage is dragged down by Mineral Resources, Western Areas, Regis Resources and Sandfire Resources, which have no women on their boards.
Nationally, the AICD said women fill 20 per cent of board positions in the country's major companies, and said there needed to be changes in how they recruited directors to lift that number.
This could mean selecting people who haven't previously been executives, setting up mentoring programs for women, and improving childcare.
The peak body for leaders of big business and non-profit groups wants the top 200 listed companies to have women in 30 per cent of board positions by the end of 2018, but isn't setting a date for smaller firms.
Companies with talented women on their boards perform better, AICD chief executive John Brogden said.
"If token women are appointed to boards, it undermines the whole diversity argument," Mr Brogden told reporters.
"Many of the critics of the target for diversity on boards will argue there simply aren't enough good, qualified women available, and I say that is unacceptable."
Nicola Wakefield Evans, a board member at Macquarie Group, Lend Lease, Toll Holdings and Bupa, said achieving a 30 per cent gender target could lead to women in half of all board positions within a decade.
The proportion of female directors at ASX 200 companies jumped from 8 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent by 2014, and Ms Wakefield Evans said the jump from 30 per cent to 50 per cent could be faster.
"It's not as simple as saying, `Women don't put themselves forward' or `It's a boys' club' - we need to move away from those sorts of labels," she said.
But there are obstacles to achieving gender equality, even though the share market operator has since 2010 required listed companies to report on gender diversity.
A quarter of Australia's top 300 companies have no women on their boards, and Medibank Private is the only listed company with more women than men on its board.
In 2014, only 19 per cent of ASX 200 companies had a gender target for their board, according to federal government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
Australia is doing better than Asia when it comes to women on boards, but lags behind the UK, which is close to achieving a 25 per cent target for its top 100 listed companies.
Germany has recently passed laws requiring companies to have women in 30 per cent of corporate board positions.
