By Talat Yaqoob

DIVERSITY is good for business. It’s a sentence we are hearing more. There is an acknowledgment that, despite being a diverse society, those with decision-making powers are not particularly diverse. As the chief executive of RBS put it, the boardroom is “too white and too male”.

He’s right and it is not just a business issue – it is critical to also view it as an equality issue.

As we go further up the chain in the financial sector, the law, the STEM industries or our politics we see fewer women and fewer people from black and minority ethnics backgrounds.

But why does it matter? From a business perspective, diverse thinking in a company’s decision-making simply makes for better decisions. Whether it is product development or strategic development, companies cater for diverse audiences and stakeholders, so profitability and productivity become linked to diversity.

It is unsurprising then that the Davis Review was launched in 2010 to increase women’s representation on FTSE 100 boards to 25 per cent.

It is crucial, however, to not see this purely as a bottom-line, profit-led issue. It is an equality issue and, yes, it is acceptable for businesses to think about, and participate in, action to improve our society. While the Davis target has been reached, it is far from being representative of our society. When mainly white men make up 75 per cent of these boards, can we really claim we are working under a meritocracy?

Let’s look at what happens when decisions are not made with diverse thinking. In 2014 Apple launched the Health App to track all your body’s mechanics and wellbeing. But it forgot one important thing which is experienced by a large part of our population – menstruation.

Apple was criticised heavily for this and unsurprisingly its development team is nearly all-male. It had financial and reputational consequences. But there is an equality consequence here; something so critical to women’s health was not given importance.

Diversity in the boardroom does not exist as an isolated issue and will not be resolved by a focus purely on the boardroom itself. Effort is needed in transforming the culture of a company at every level to create inclusivity, implement flexible working and tackle micro-inequalities that women, those from BME background, those from the LGBT and disabled community face daily.

Equally we must recognise and put effort into fair access to opportunities in education and employment, from the early years, when attitudes are formed and, too often, ambitions are suppressed.

While the comments from the RBS chief executive are welcome, just earlier this year the chairman of Tesco said that white men were becoming an endangered species in the boardroom.

Given that action on diversity has remained light touch at best, with boardrooms looking largely the same, it was a rather ridiculous claim to make but illustrates that we have a long way still to go and that not everyone has got the message.

Talat Yaqoob is the director of Equate Scotland and co-founder of Women 5050.