U.K.'s ConvaTec Names First Female Director, Seeks Second

(Bloomberg) -- ConvaTec Group Plc, the U.K. medical products company that has angered some investors because of the absence of women on its board, named Ros Rivaz as its first female director.

Rivaz, the 61-year-old former chief operating officer of Smith & Nephew Plc, will be a non-executive member of the board, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. ConvaTec had made its trading debut last October and later joined the U.K.’s benchmark FTSE 100 index, becoming the first company in the gauge to have an all-male board since June 2014.

The appointment may help ease concerns that the progress made to add women to U.K. company boards is stalling. Earlier this year, fund manager Aberdeen Asset Management took the unusual step of opposing a ConvaTec resolution at its annual meeting to protest the lack of female directors. Chairman Christopher Gent on Wednesday pledged to seek a second woman as he aims to improve gender diversity and make a majority of the directors independent.

Former Standard Chartered Plc Chairman Mervyn Davies in 2011 drew up a strategy to increase the number of women on company boards, leading to the government urging the country’s biggest companies to adopt a voluntary goal of at least 25 percent female directors. Before that, women’s representation stood at 12.5 percent.

Not Acceptable

“I’m delighted to see Convatec embark on its journey to build a gender balanced board,” said Denise Wilson, who is chief executive of the Hampton-Alexander Review, a government-backed group charged with increasing diversity on U.K. boards. “In 2017, six years on from the Davies Review, all-male boards for FTSE listed companies can no longer be acceptable.”

Gent has said that the group was close to hiring a woman on its board ahead of the listing, but the person pulled out late in the process.

Only one in four board openings was filled by a woman in the past year, compared with one-third a year earlier, according to data from the main U.K. corporate lobbying group Confederation of British Industry. There were a total of eight companies in the FTSE 350 with all male boards as of May 15.

Shares of ConvaTec fell 0.3 percent to 327.90 pence as of 12:17 p.m. in London trading. The stock has gained almost 41 percent this year.

There are fears that gender equality has also recently taken a back seat in the U.S. Just under 28 percent of the 431 open board seats in the Fortune 500 companies were awarded to women in 2016, down from 30 percent the year before.

To contact the reporters on this story: Chitra Somayaji in London at csomayaji@bloomberg.net, David Hellier in London at dhellier@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chitra Somayaji at csomayaji@bloomberg.net, Paul Jarvis