Pauline Ngan Po-ling goes beyond the call of duty as executive director of one of the world’s largest cap makers. She is part boss, part dutiful mother figure.
The 54-year-old co-founder and deputy chairman of Mainland Headwear prevents ambitious male directors from over-borrowing; and to maintain marriages, Hong Kong managers working across the border are banned from having mistresses.
She also plays a peacemaking role in settling disputes at male-dominated overseas offices, pacifying some 800 sewing workers at the firm’s factory in Bangladesh and feeding homesick Hong Kong managers at the factory with Hong Kong canned food.
Ngan is a firm believer in the need for a female touch in the cut-throat corporate world. To groom a torchbearer, she promoted a long-serving assistant, Maggie Gu, to be chief operating officer and an executive director last year, lifting the number of female directors to two on the nine-strong board.
“A board should have more females, who are relatively more thoughtful, risk-sensitive, decisive and care less about face,” Ngan said. “Male directors are more ambitious and take the lead in making decisions, so female counterparts make a good balance.”
Mainland Headwear is among the minority of Hong Kong firms with a relatively diversified board in terms of gender.
It is also among the 7 per cent of Hong Kong companies that last year had women comprising more than 20 per cent of board members. The city lags behind the 9 per cent in Singapore and 17 per cent globally, according to a Thomson Reuters survey.
Companies which fail to comply with the policy must explain why they cannot.
“It’s a coming issue globally,” said corporate governance advocate David Webb.
Sifting data on women’s representation on Hong Kong-listed firms for the past 23 years, Webb found that women only made up 10.94 per cent of boards in the year to date, up marginally from 9.81 per cent a decade ago. He doubted if the ratio would ever get close to 50 per cent.
“They make different value judgments and choices in their lives,” he said. “Probably a smaller proportion of women than men prioritise climbing the corporate ladder and playing office politics over spending time with their children and families and other options. Their value judgments on work-life balance are different.”
Gu, who joined the board of Mainland Headwear last year, found a balance in her family and work life.
The second highest-paid director after Ngan, Gu took home a pay package of HK$1.66 million last year. She goes home at about 7pm, has dinner with her five-year-old son, goes through his homework and tucks him into bed before turning on the computer and working with managers in the firm’s offices in the United States.
“Because of the time zone differences, I can have some quality time with my son,” said the 36-year-old, who is one of the youngest executive directors in Hong Kong.
Ngan, who believes a harmonious family life helps staff productivity and efficiency, lays off managers who are found to have extramarital affairs.
Whenever male directors wanted to borrow heavily, she would step in and stop them. “Men tend to love running businesses entirely on borrowing, but I don’t want to see this,” she said.
She pointed to Mainland Headwear’s debt-equity ratio of 7.1 per cent in June, compared with zero in December last year and the industry average of 50 per cent.
Ngan said female directors were better at some skills than the opposite sex. A case in point was two weeks ago, when Ngan flew to the firm’s factory in Bangladesh with 30kg of canned luncheon pork. The food was a bonus for the factory’s Hong Kong manager, who felt lonely and homesick in the Muslim, pork-free country.
“The motherly nature of women complements a company and its management well,” she said. “Men generally look from the macro perspective, which means a board should contain a balance of genders.”
Amy Lau, the University of Hong Kong’s director of executive education, said women should be empowered and equipped to climb the corporate ladder. “In many cases, women are skipped over for job promotions and sponsorships and have lower pay increases in a male-dominated environment.”
HKU for the first time in April teamed with British-based recruitment firm Harvey Nash to hold a women’s directorship programme.
According to the Thomson Reuters study, diversified boards performed better than unisex ones. Polling 4,094 firms around the globe, including 60 in Hong Kong and 85 on the mainland, the survey found that having women on boards might have contributed to companies’ shares performing better than or in line with benchmark indices such as the MSCI World.
Adding a female touch
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