Government cites Webb-site board stats without attribution
25 March 2015
The Government today published a reply from Secretary for Financial Services and The Treasury (SFST), Ceajar Chan Ka Keung (Mr Chan), to a question from Legislator Emily Lau Wai Hing on the proportion of female directors on boards of HK-listed companies.
The reply includes an attachment showing the distribution of the number of female directors per board at 31-Dec-2014 and stating the average board size (8.43 directors) and the average numbers of female and male directors (0.95 and 7.48 respectively) and that overall, 11.3% of directors were female. The source of all this information was said to be "The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong" (SEHK), which is a subsidiary of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEx, 0388). Mr Chan (who was once a professor) said that SEHK "reviews regularly the statistics on the proportion of female members" without saying whose statistics they review.
Maybe the appendix was provided to the SFST by HKEx, but you won't find these statistics anywhere on the HKEx web site. As far as we know, the only source of such complete analysis on HK-listed boards is Webb-site Who's Who (WWW), and you can find the same table on this page, and the number of directors per board on this page.
We are delighted that SEHK and the Government find our work useful, but it takes our staff hundreds of hours each year to maintain this database (which goes back to 1990) as a free public service by painstakingly collecting data from company announcements (none of the data is published in machine-readable form), so the least that SEHK and Government could do is acknowledge the source of the statistics. As a for-profit regulator, HKEx does not spend the money needed to compile this analysis on its own. When HKEx published a consultation paper on diversity in Sep-2012, it did acknowledge Webb-site on page 16.
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