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Breaking into the boardroom requires strategy, expertise and deliberate career planning.
Mentorship, visibility and targeted experience help women to secure paid non-executive roles and to contribute effectively to board decision making.
Senior women leaders play a vital role in guiding, sponsoring and advocating for the next generation of female directors.
Women like Cathy Kovacs FAICD, Natalie Chapman and Michelle Redfern GAICD are reshaping the boardroom, showing how strategy, expertise and networking can secure paid non-executive director roles.
Cathy Kovacs FAICD is a seasoned non-executive director (NED) with board experience across fintech, financial services and education, including OFX, HUB24, Magellan Financial Group and Grapple. After a successful executive career at Macquarie and Westpac, she had planned to transition into the boardroom.
“I was just turning 50, in the prime of my executive career, and found I needed to send a message to people considering me for board roles that I was absolutely committed to the boardroom,” says Kovacs.
While she didn’t perceive overt gender bias, Kovacs suspects there may have been doubts about her ability to transition successfully from executive roles to a non-executive director position. “It’s not until you make it that they say, ‘Oh, now we can see you fit here’.”
Despite Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) setbacks in the US, the business case for gender-diverse boards remains strong. A five-year analysis to September 2024 by US finance firm MSCI Inc found companies with at least 30 per cent female board representation delivered cumulative returns that were 18.9 per cent higher than boards with no women.
Breaking into the boardroom
Data released by the AICD last year on board gender diversity found that momentum on moving the needle is slowing as female representation nears the 40 per cent mark across the ASX100, 200 and 300.
By September 2025, all but one ASX 20 companies had reached the target of 30 per cent female directors, compared to 43 on the ASX 50 and 82 on the ASX 100.
“Taking the macro view, things have become better, however, progress is very slow!” says Michelle Redfern GAICD, author of The Leadership Compass and a director with Bega Group and Medtronic ANZ.
The memory of breaking into directorships 15 years ago remains vivid for Redfern. With senior roles at Telstra, Serco and NAB on her resume, along with numerous voluntary positions on school and sporting committees, she began openly sharing that she was seeking board opportunities.
“I applied, and kept applying,” she says. “It was a bit soul-destroying because sometimes you hear back, sometimes you don’t. You ask for feedback and either don’t get it or get something fluffy. Then I got a board role in the Australian Rules football system and that started momentum.”
She advises women to take the advice she took herself: Get involved with Women on Boards and the AICD. “Learning how your board CV differs from your executive CV was a light-bulb moment.”
Redfern, who is also an energetic advocate for women leaders in sport and business through her eponymous consultancy, adds that while percentages may look promising, “how many actual women are there? A few women are on a lot of boards, so the percentage of representation doesn’t tell the whole story. You might have one woman being counted six times”.
For emerging female leaders, breaking into paid directorships can remain a challenge, as Natalie Chapman GAICD, co-founder and managing director of gemaker, explains. “I’ve grown my own business over 15 years, built up expertise in innovation and research organisations and done a lot of voluntary work on boards, which aligns with my personal values. But none of them are paid”.
Chapman, who holds an MBA and degrees in chemistry and marketing and serves on the board of Women in STEMM Australia, has applied for a few paid government board roles. While she hasn’t pursued them aggressively, she remains ambitious and optimistic about future opportunities.
“I have marketing and STEM expertise together, which is extraordinarily powerful for the technical sector,” she says. “It’s important not to give up, to find the gap a board has and know how you can fill it.”
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Holding the ladder for the next generation
“Throughout my executive career, there were very rarely more senior women than me in the room,” says Kovacs. She credits being upfront about her board ambitions as key to advancing them.
“I found when you get to the right person, both men and women are very supportive of people in the non-executive director world. I’m very keen to be that person for the next generation.”
Redfern says women who are “accomplished and well-networked” should ask themselves, “How do I use my social and political capital to bring forward even just one woman who would add value to an organisation — and also to her long-term aspirations?” One of her guiding principles is: “I do not fix women, I design systems that enable them to reach their full potential.”
She urges women who have successfully taken their places in boardrooms to “look quite forensically at the women in your network and have open conversations about their ambitions”.
Guiding future female directors requires forthright conversations. “You need to tell them where their skills are strong and where they need to develop,” says Redfern, who urges women to acquire demonstrable financial smarts.
“Women are told they have great EQ and communication skills. They’re not told often enough that the gate-opener skills to directorships are being able to set and oversee a strategy, understand financial statements, ask questions and know how businesses make money.”
When she sees evidence of those skills in a woman with board aspirations, Redfern will hit go on “putting my social and political capital on the line to bring you into the conversations where you can progress”.
Authenticity is power
Kovacs says she’s been fortunate to have never been the sole woman on a board. “I believe joining a board where you’re one of at least two women is definitely more productive because you’re more likely to be heard. If you’re the only female, your work might be slightly harder.”
Rather than gender, Kovacs prefers to focus on “authenticity and empathy in leadership” and says she has also been very considered in directorships she has sought or accepted.
“To be most effective, you need to find a boardroom where your voice can be heard. I’ve very deliberately chosen to sit around the table with people where I know I have something to offer — and they know it too.”
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