The proportion of women on the boards of 200 of Britain’s top financial firms has risen to nearly a third in the five years since the government launched an initiative to improve gender balance in the sector, a report said yesterday.
Since the launch of the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter in March 2016, the number of women on the boards of the companies had risen to 32 percent from 23 percent, think tank New Financial said in a review of the charter’s impact.
Female representation on executive committees had increased to 22 percent from 14 percent, it added. Based on the current rate of change, women would reach parity in boardroom in 2029 and on executive committees in 2033.
“While female representation is moving in the right direction, there is still a long way to go,” said Yasmine Chinwala, partner at New Financial and coauthor of the report.
“If the industry is to maintain the pace of change in the next half decade, it will have to take on the tougher challenges,” she said.
Among them are the need to build a pipeline of female talent, ensure accountability is taken across the organization and to develop more women in revenue-generating roles.
“Over the next five years, we need to move from talk to action, from working in isolation to working together, and move from a narrow perception of gender diversity to encompass women from every walk of life and every part of society,” said Amanda Blanc, chief executive at British insurer Aviva PLC.
Taiwan’s rapidly aging population is fueling a sharp increase in homes occupied solely by elderly people, a trend that is reshaping the nation’s housing market and social fabric, real-estate brokers said yesterday. About 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident, the Ministry of the Interior said. The figures have nearly doubled from a decade earlier, Great Home Realty Co (大家房屋) said, as people aged 65 and older now make up 20.8 percent of the population. “The so-called silver tsunami represents more than just a demographic shift — it could fundamentally redefine the
The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies. The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech. Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of
Businesses across the global semiconductor supply chain are bracing themselves for disruptions from an escalating trade war, after China imposed curbs on rare earth mineral exports and the US responded with additional tariffs and restrictions on software sales to the Asian nation. China’s restrictions, the most targeted move yet to limit supplies of rare earth materials, represent the first major attempt by Beijing to exercise long-arm jurisdiction over foreign companies to target the semiconductor industry, threatening to stall the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. They prompted US President Donald Trump on Friday to announce that he would impose an additional
China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday. The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion. Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said. In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September
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