“At end of the day, it doesn’t matter what your gender is, you’re not going to stay there very long if you don’t contribute to the board.” – Sandra Burmeister, CEO of Landelahni Recruitment

skills returning to the South African workforce. Sandra says, “At the moment, we see the growth in the African market and the implications on our local skills, so many banks and mining companies and big infrastructure projects see that it is obvious to get skills from here”. In terms of gender equality in the boardroom, Sandra has mentioned before that at the current rate of change there would only be gender equality in this area by 2050 – this was a strictly mathematical equation based on the shifts from year to year over a 5 year period. However, her feeling is that in South Africa we are making better progress than in many other countries. One of the reasons for this is that South Africa has a legislative framework that has been particularly gender- friendly. Sandra states, “Even though the Employment Equity Act doesn’t set specific targets, you yourself need to set gender targets in your company, based on the industry. But then industry charters have set specific targets against which they are now being measured, so all of those frameworks have really elevated the gender issues in boardrooms in this country, in government, and we have seen really significant increases in gender equality”. A good example that she provides of this comes from 2004 data – in the mining industry in 2001 only 0.01% of board members were women,

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now the figure is closer to 30- 40%. This is a very significant change over a 10 year period. Organisations such as the

International Women’s’ Forum and the Businesswoman’s’ Association of SA are helping to promote women in business with various programmes. They have interesting programmes from SMME development to coaching and mentoring that you might not find in other areas. Although the Employment

companies are actively doing more to develop and promote women and give women the right opportunities to get up to board level, rather than just implementing so-called ‘window-dressing’. Sandra answers quite

Equity Act and other legislative frameworks in South Africa can be seen as putting pressure on companies to comply with gender equality, it is also a fact that you don’t want to put people on your board just to make up the numbers. So, the question remains whether

fervently that companies are definitely pulling their weight in this department. She says that “The big driver is the tenders in governance, and what we’ve seen – and one of the reasons why board sizes have increased so substantially in the last couple of years – is that there are very onerous governance requirements”. She explains that in a 2006 board survey, just over 80% of JSE Top 100 board members held more than 4 seats. Last year, 89% of these board members held only one seat. This is because of the strict