business case for female quotas, says Renée Adams, a professor and

Commonwealth Bank (CBA) Chair in Finance at the Australian School of

Business. Too much emphasis on placing women at the top obscures the

systemic difficulties many women face in pursuing and maintaining

full-time careers. Policy-makers should concentrate on working from the

bottom up to build a talent pipeline. Carolyn Kay, a non-executive

director at CBA, sees progress being made in female representation but

says more needs to be done, noting that “we are still losing women at

senior levels”.