The Coalition needs to introduce quotas to lift women in its ranks, says the chairman of 30% Club Australia, the lobby group pushing for 30 per cent female representation on the boards of the nation's top companies.

Key points: The 30% Club aims to get more women onto listed company boards and has had a voluntary target of 30 per cent women on boards for the ASX200

The 30% Club aims to get more women onto listed company boards and has had a voluntary target of 30 per cent women on boards for the ASX200 The group will now also focus on companies in the ASX201-300 ranks hitting that target

The group will now also focus on companies in the ASX201-300 ranks hitting that target Leading board director Nicola Wakefield-Evans, who heads the 30% Club, wants the Coalition to introduce quotas to lift senior women

But Ms Wakefield-Evans, a non-executive director of Macquarie Group, rejected the need for corporate Australia to do the same, saying the 30% Club will instead focus on ensuring more listed companies meet its voluntary target.

The group will now also focus on companies in the ASX201-300 ranks to hit 30 per cent. Previously only ASX200 were pushed to meet the voluntary target.

Ms Wakefield Evans, who is also a director at Lendlease Corporation and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, said that the 30% Club had discussed the option of having mandated quotas, but decided against it as voluntary targets had resulted in incremental change.

But she said she was disappointed by the numbers of senior women in the Liberal party, and hoped the Coalition would consider mandated quotas immediately.

"The Coalition's statistics are no longer acceptable, I worry they are not applying a diversity lens across what they do," she said.

"They [the numbers of women] are just not in step with society's expectations."

Lack of senior Liberal women 'causing discriminatory policy'

In recent weeks the Liberal party has seen high-profile women, including Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Minister for Women Kelly O'Dwyer, announcing their departures, after Liberal MP Julia Banks last year resigned from the party and said it was "years behind" in its treatment of women.

In 2016, the Liberals set a non-enforceable target of 50 per cent female candidates by 2025, but currently only 23 per cent of its federal representatives are women.

There are also fears a number of female MPs in marginal seats could lose their seats at the federal election.

Ms Wakefield-Evans said the lack of women in the Liberal party had contributed to "discriminatory" laws and policies.

She cited examples including superannuation laws that don't account for the fact that females take time out of work to have children and end up resulting in women retiring with less money than men.

She also noted the lack of policies around affordable childcare and increasing women's participation in paid work.

'Diversity fatigue' in corporate Australia

Ms Wakefield-Evans also conceded that there was a problem with "diversity fatigue" when it came to shifting the dial for corporate Australia.

She said the 30% Club was establishing a working group comprised of investment bankers and private equity players to influence the appointment of women to boards.

The latest Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) gender diversity figures show women now make up 29.7 per cent of all ASX200 board positions, an increase of over 10 percentage points since the target was set in 2015.

There are still three boards in the ASX200 with no women on their boards: ARB Corporation, Emeco Holdings and TPG Telecom. And there are 50 boards on the ASX200 with only one woman on their board.

"We've seen real change occur without quotas — we were one of the first jurisdictions globally to reach 30 per cent mid-way through last year for the top 100 companies," Ms Wakefield Evans said.

"I worry about quotas [being introduced in corporate Australia] leading to women being appointed because they are women," she said, but noted that was not the case when it came to politics with a highly uneven representation of women.

ASX principles 'not too prescriptive'

There was still much work to be done on diversity when it came to companies beyond the ASX200.

The number of female company directors for the ASX201-300 stood at 19.7 per cent, only a marginal improvement on 19.4 per cent in 2015. And in this group of companies, there were still 28 companies with no females on their boards.

The ASX Corporate Governance Principles are currently being updated, with proposals including introducing the concept of having a social licence to operate, as well as the need for 30 per cent female board targets.

There has been pushback from corporate Australia on this, with groups such as the AICD, and AMP chairman David Murray, saying it is "too prescriptive", but Ms Wakefield Evans disagreed it was.

Ms Wakefield Evans also said no-women boards like ARB Corporation, which have attributed the absence of women to factors such as their board size, were not looking hard enough.

She said rather than wait for a board vacancy, some boards had acted swiftly and appointed a qualified female as an additional board director.

Investor pressure would help more companies hit the 30 per cent target, she said.

Major global investors such as State Street Global Advisors and BlackRock have been pushing S&P500 boards to act, and locally the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) has vowed to use its proxy voting powers to vote against re-election of directors on companies with no women on their boards.