Many recent articles, such as these from the Guardian and the BBC have been reporting that the gender gap, instead of getting closer, is widening in terms of male and female pay.
The gap is narrowing between younger age groups, but overall the gap is widening. The issue here is why, after such attention to gender for all these years and with the Davies report pending on having more women on boards, is the pay gap widening?
The articles indicate that this is still a gender-based problem, but I suspect that if this is the case then gender is not the principal reason. The principle reason is very simply one of cost.
If one looks at apprenticeships as another example, a current apprenticeship is currently positioned at half of the national wage. The underlying problem is that in the current [...]

We send women to war, to Afghanistan and now to Libya, as soldiers and as reporters, but we do not put them on boards. Why not? Are boards more dangerous than Libya or Afghanistan? I really doubt it. Do women need to be physically fitter for the board? I doubt that too. There is no need for endurance tests on the board, and it is no more dangerous than any combat zone where we send women. Women are just as capable of being on boards as men, but the argument needs to be exactly this—one of capabilities, not one of gender.
While many studies suggest that having women on a board can increase share value, as discussed in the recent Financial Times article, “ Women at top lift shares, study shows ” by Masa Serdarevic, there are just as many studies that show that shares drop when [...]

The one type of diversity that boards have continuously neglected is this skill and experience necessary to become a high performing board member.  If we take the board directors of FTSE 100 companies, every one of them has been a corporate centre director either currently or previously.
It is becoming a greater requirement that you cannot be a board member until you have had corporate centre director experience. Boards show reluctance to break from this fundamental assumption. A recent article in ABC’s The Drum , by Paula Matthewson, titled “Boards need diversity, not necessarily women” , observes that boards could benefit from searching for candidates with a broader range of skills and experience, inpependent of their gender.  Matthewson then implies that women have the potential to meet some of these selection criteria better than men. Unfortunately, today we see boards taking one demographic, women, and [...]

I recently came across this article in the Financial Times by Michel Ferrary of the Ceram Business School, in which he argues that companies (and the boards and senior management therein) with a higher number of women managers are better able to face the economic downturn. This finding will certainly find favour across a number of quarters.
However, the research that we have conducted–which spans 12,500 top teams and well over 2,000 boards–suggests that there is no difference in operational or strategic performance between male and female managers. In fact, gender emerged as the least predicted demographic concerning effectiveness of performance.  It should be noted that similar findings applied to education, sector, religion, geographical location and personal background. [...]