Two years on from his government-commissioned report into the lack of women on listed company boards, the former Standard Chartered chairman said childcare costs were the biggest barrier to women reaching the top and said mothers needed more financial help to return to work and “make work pay”.
Bigger tax breaks should be paid for by reducing budgets elsewhere in government, such as the amount of money paid to aid women’s issues abroad, he said.
“Because childcare is so expensive, we have to have tax breaks. Everyone says we haven’t got any money, so we need to take it from somewhere else, e.g. aid to other countries for women’s issues. We need to say, 'hang on a minute, why don’t we put the money into this?’ This is about economic growth.”
In his initial women-on-boards report, published two years ago almost to the day, Lord Davies set FTSE 100 companies a voluntary target of increasing the number of women at the top from 12.5pc to 25pc by 2015. Business has made “good” progress, getting that number up to 17.5pc over the period.
But having attended over 200 events with mothers and businesses since his report’s publication, Lord Davies said by far the biggest barrier to achieving change was childcare. “The reality is, if you have a child and want to work, it’s so expensive it puts a lot of women off working.”
Last month, radical plans to offer tax breaks worth about £2,000 per child to all parents with young children were put on hold – just three days after they were announced – as senior ministers haggled over the detail and funding of the scheme.
But Lord Davies said it was crucial for ministers to introduce decent tax breaks or thousands of women would continue to miss out on gaining vital workplace experience and the leadership skills necessary to be considered for board roles later on.
Other barriers to getting women on company boards stem from a much earlier age, with a lack of female, business role models for young schoolchildren, he said. “Back in the day we had Anita Roddick [The Body Shop founder], now kids’ role models are pop stars.”
He also attacked the seven remaining “pathetic” FTSE 100 companies, such as Glencore, for having no women on their boards.