Jim Armitage: Fund managers are the real dinosaurs in the equality debate

Goldman Sachs is predicting a commodities meltdown, Glencore is flogging more dud mines, but it’s not all bad news from our dirty diggers.

BHP Billiton has shown the macho mining world that, guess what, you can appoint women to the board.

Chairman Jac Nasser today hired Lloyds deputy boss Anita Frew as a non-executive director and, for good measure, promoted Shriti Vadera to senior non-executive.

Don’t get the bunting out yet, though. That still means only three of BHP’s 11 directors are women and at its recently spun-off South 32 business, only one in eight is.

And the situation is worse among the top team actually running the businesses — one in 10 of the senior management team at BHP is female and one in seven at South 32 is.

Will BHP’s top investors start pushing for further female appointments? I wonder. Although boardroom blokes get bashed for barely reaching the 25% target for female directors, of the fund managers who actually wield the most external power, only 7% are women.

And in the US, whose investment houses own large swathes of the FTSE, it’s only 2%. Anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers are falling.

Footsie boards are slowly getting their act together after years of naming and shaming, rightly promoted by Government. Surely it’s time for fund management paymasters to be treated the same.