Dismantling the glass ceiling in the workplace

Growing up on the East Rand in Gauteng, Zanele Morrison never imagined that she would one day become the voice of Africa’s biggest stock exchange.

But today, as director of corporate communication and marketing at the JSE, she is living her “wildest dream”.

“We think the game is not changing, but I see it every day,” she says. “I see that somebody has come to lift the glass ceiling, I see the inclusivity and I see the diversion.”

Of the 388 companies listed on the JSE, less than 5% in the top 100 have female representation at board level.

Morrison, who has been in the industry for more than 25 years, says she is hopeful that with the rise of highly-educated women, there will be an increase of females in leadership roles in companies, and at an earlier stage in their careers.

“I see young female professionals rising up to senior positions,” she says. “We are making progress and it is very slow. We just have to keep raising the volume and the amount of noise we make about how important it actually is for listed entities [to have female representation at executive levels].”

The JSE’s past two CEOs have been female, and its current chair is female.

Morris says five out of eight executives at the JSE are women, 67% of its board members are female, and of its 397 employees, 311 or 53.15% are women.

She says this is how the JSE is setting the agenda for other listed companies to follow.

“We believe it is our role to set the tone for what we believe our listed entities need to follow. We are not just setting the role in terms of hiring, but also in our engagements. We are setting the example in a true and authentic way,” Morris says.

A better working environment

A report by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, which surveyed 3 000 companies for six years globally, found that there is a correlation between women on boards and improved company performance.

“We find clear evidence that companies with a higher proportion of women in decision-making roles, continue to generate higher returns on equity while running more conservative balance sheets,” the report says.

Where women account for the majority in top management, it found that businesses show superior sales growth, high returns on investments, lower leverage, and higher valuations. 

“Companies with at least one woman on the board have outperformed in terms of share price performance those with no women on the board, over the course of the past six years,” it says.

It is evident that there are many aspects of business that improve when there are diverse viewpoints around the boardroom table. 

Opening doors

Morris says the reason JSE-listed companies have little female representation is not due to a lack of suitable candidates.

“I do not think there is a lack of talent or calibre of women for these roles. What is lacking is [for companies] to give people opportunities to take on those roles.

“And not just general people and not just well-known people, but people who are extremely qualified and women who are quietly sitting in senior roles and who are doing amazing work.”

Morris says she has noticed that most companies tend to appoint the same people into managerial roles.

“We tend to want to choose … the same people over and over again, versus investing in the development of women and putting them into a senior role and allowing them to learn for a period of a year,” she says. “The biggest problem is getting that first board position.”

According to the Businesswomen’s Association of South Africa’s Women in Leadership Census, conducted from 2012 to 2017, only 26 JSE-listed companies consistently had a 25%+ female board, while approximately 45 of the 277 companies surveyed had no female directors at all.