I will start, because you asked about the board. I can tell you that, as the chair, I am very attuned to the issue, as I have been throughout my career in lots of different spaces, and particularly here.
When we have had searches for new board members, we have been very proactive in spelling out at the beginning of the search the kinds of diversity that we would like on the board. Diversity is more than gender. I realise that gender is the area that has been crystallised just now, but diversity of thought, background and experience is what makes a really strong board.
However—and I have no hesitation about doing this at any stage in a search—I have looked particularly at candidates who are female, and I have pushed and spoken to panel members or whoever is considering the candidates to see whether we have missed anything. I know, as a woman, that women often have quite different career paths than men do, so we need to be open-minded when we look at somebody’s experiences on a CV to see what value they might bring.
In recent searches, we have appointed two very strong women to our board—Samantha Barber and Deirdre Michie—who have very different backgrounds and they are contributing a good deal. I would love to get 50:50 representation. The thing about a board is that members cannot be changed at will; they have terms, so you change people when the time comes, but it is hard to have an instantaneous impact.
Douglas Millican can speak to encouraging younger women up through the organisation, but at board level, we talk about issues such as the gender mix and about what programmes the organisation has to encourage women to not only start but continue their careers, right through the decades of their lives, so that they have that chance to rise up.
There are women’s networks and I have spoken to one about being professional for my entire life and how to balance that with family matters and other factors.
There are a lot of things that one can do, but Alex Rowley is right that, at the end of the day, it should be a goal to have very senior women in the organisation. We are beginning to see that happen. Some of our strongest up-and-coming women have come and talked to us on the board, and as we become familiar with them, we give them exposure to us. Perhaps that is enough said from the board level.