International Women’s Day

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, this is the 25th anniversary of the Beijing declaration. Right up front I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Loomba, who founded the Loomba Foundation for poor widows, initially in India and then around the world. I have been proud to be chair of the advisory council since its inception in 1997. He should also be given credit for securing UN recognition for International Widows Day on 23 June each year. This has done so much to change attitudes and raise awareness for the plight of widows around the world, including educating widows’ children. I am so looking forward to the maiden speech of my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Ranger.

I am vice-president of the CBI. Our deputy director-general, Henrietta Jowitt, recently spoke at the Women in Investment Festival and made some excellent points. Basically, she said that diverse companies are better companies. The real argument is not that women need business; business needs women. Companies with more diversity at the top, in their executive teams, actually perform better. At the CBI we hear this from our members time and again. If a business has a more diverse executive team, it is going to be 33% more profitable than other businesses. Evidence suggests that bridging the gender pay gap could boost UK GDP by about £150 billion—more jobs, more investment; a real, material improvement to people’s lives.

However, there is a lot of progress still to be made. The Minister mentioned ethnic minorities. The recent Parker review found that only 54 FTSE 250 businesses met the target of having at least one person from an ethnic minority background on their board. In 2017 more than 500 BAME executive were board-ready but that is what we have achieved. How can this be right when nearly 20% of the population of the UK is from an ethnic minority background?

The public are constantly looking to businesses to operate responsibly and sustainably. This is the agenda that our customers, suppliers and clients all expect. Companies are taking steps to close the gender pay gap. EY, the firm that I work with, has EY Reconnect, a returnship programme for people who have had a career break. There is job sharing, the use of technology and collaboration with schools. Tata Consultancy Services has a programme to inspire more women to move into the STEM sector. The CBI has published the Bridge the Gap guide, which provides practical advice on how to start conversations about race at work and increase disclosure rates to help reduce the ethnic pay gap. In 2018 the CBI’s gender pay gap stood at 12.6% mean and 19.7% median.

I am chancellor of the University of Birmingham. In the 1950s my mother studied at the University of Birmingham and every day she went to classes wearing her sari.

The Minister spoke about women outperforming men. Well, 59% of our undergraduates are female and —wait for this—88.7% of female undergraduate students were awarded 2:1s or first-class degrees compared with 83.8% male undergraduate students. Also, 54% of our staff are female. But there is the pay gap—our average hourly pay-rate for women was 19.1% lower mean or 19.6% lower median, although this has decreased. The university has institutional targets to achieve 30% female representation of professors, as well as of senior researchers, senior lecturers and readers. In 2019, 27.5% of our professors and 39.8% of our senior researchers, senior lecturers and readers were female. So, we are working and conducting research on the UN global goals, including goal 5:

“Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.”


When it comes to companies, in 2010, women made up only 12.5% of the members of corporate boards and FTSE 100 companies; this was up from 9.4% in 2004. In 2010, Dame Helena Morrissey, a university contemporary of mine from Cambridge, founded the 30% Club setting a target of 30% women on FTSE 100 boards. We have made a lot of progress on this. We then had the Davies review in 2011, which set a target of 25% female representation by 2015, and now women hold a third of board positions in the UK’s top public companies. The latest data shows that one of the two targets set by the Government’s Hampton-Alexander review has been hit: women filling 33% of board seats in the top 350 UK listed companies by the end of this year. But the review is struggling to achieve its second main aim of having 33% of women in the leadership teams of firms listed in the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250. The boardroom target has been achieved voluntarily; that is the thing—there has been no legislation on this. However, the Hampton-Alexander review highlighted a lack of female representation in senior leadership and executive roles, with women making up only 15% of FTSE 100 directors.

I am proud to chair the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School. Very sadly, one of our professors, Sucheta Nadkarni, passed away in October 2019. She was a real force at the business school, and director of the Cambridge Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre. The centre has done amazing work, including on the Cambridge Rising Women Leaders Programme, which has shown that diversity in senior leadership encourages innovation, improves decision-making, reduces corporate misconduct and improves financial returns. We are witnessing great strides, although there is still so much work to do. Positive progress has been made, with the number of female executives globally set to rise by 36%. This centre has amazing courses that are oversubscribed year after year.

I am also proud to be ambassador for the British Library’s Business and IP Centre. We have seen there very clearly that the business landscape in the UK continues to be dominated by men, with only 20% of businesses nationwide owned by women and fewer than 5% by ethnic minority women. The Minister mentioned the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, which estimated that if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men, this could add up to £250 billion to the value of the economy. We are doing our best to help all this. However, only 6.6% of women are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and, globally, we are still battling an average 32% gender pay gap.

India, where I was born, had a woman Prime Minister in Indira Gandhi well before we had Margaret Thatcher over here. Although we have had two Chancellors of the Exchequer, one after the other, who are British Asians—my friends Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak—India had its first female Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, last year. We are yet to have a female Chancellor of the Exchequer in this country. An American consultancy firm, Korn Ferry, found in its research a few years ago that women outperform men in 11 of 12 key emotional intelligence competencies.