The Automotive 30% Club is motoring towards its “30 by 30” goal, having filled 27% of key leadership and decision-making roles with women - only 3% away from its target of 30% by 2030.

Founded in 2016 by Julia Muir CEO of Gaia Innovation, the Automotive 30% Club is a network of 70 automotive CEOs and MDs who committed to increasing female representation in their organisations in order to reap the benefits of a gender-balanced business.

The 30% figure is believed to be the tipping point at which the majority within a group assimilates the views and different perspectives of the minority. Once achieved, the group starts to function as a broader thinking heterogenous group able to build profitable gender-balanced businesses that are able to attract high performers from the widest talent pool possible.

“An impressive 41% of our member companies are already at or above 30% with six years still to go,” it said.

The Automotive 30% Club said it focuses on key leadership and decision-making roles as it believes these roles are critical for leading business transformation and inclusive culture change in that they provide essential role models to ensure a pipeline of high performing successors.

Even so, almost half its members (48%) have also reached a 30% female representation in the total workforce, significantly higher than the industry average of 19.8%, according to the latest motor industry figures published by the SMMT.

The findings come from a survey last September of 64 Automotive 30% Club members, equating to a 96% response rate. This included nine manufacturers, 26 retailers of varying sizes, eight businesses in finance and leasing, and 21 companies aggregated into a mixed category.

The category with the best female representation in key leadership and decision-making roles is finance and leasing with 37%, closely followed by the mixed category at 33%, manufacturers are at 24% and retailers at 23.5%.

“It is an advantage to have finance and leasing and in the club because they provide a wealth of best practice and share innovative solutions across the network,” it noted.

Julia Muir, founder of the Automotive 30% Club said: “It’s fantastic that so many of our members are already at 30% six years before our target date of 2030. It’s encouraging to see these companies collaborating and sharing best practice, and taking an inclusive and meritocratic approach, where people are thriving irrespective of their gender.

“I’m very confident that all these members will achieve the Club’s 30 by 30 goal, set when I founded the Club in 2016. The management levels with the least female representation are still the board at 20% and operating committee at 22%, but it’s reassuring to see that the current male incumbents of those roles are working hard to ensure that female talent is not lost from the sector or excluded from the top team in the future, with an impressive 28% female representation in their direct reports level.”

The full report was written by Muir, author of “Change the Game: The Leader’s Route Map to a Winning Gender-Balanced Business” which was distributed to Automotive 30% Club members on January 30. It will be discussed in detail at their annual conference in May, where high performers will be recognised

Our digital products