“Still No Progress After Years of No Progress,” reads Catalyst’s recently released 2013 census of women directors and executive officers in the Fortune 500. Indeed, the news is not good: the percentage of women directors in the Fortune 500 at 16.9% has remained flat (it was 16.6% in 2012 and 16.1% in 2011). Why, when there’s so much conversation about the topic, are the numbers not moving?

We contend in order to see real movement change must occur within three spheres: at the country, organizational and individual levels.

A number of countries have tried to devise remedies—from the legislative implementation of quotas to regulatory agency reporting requirements (e.g., of the gender composition on boards)—to increase women’s representation on boards. And we have also seen a vast amount of enterprise and energy brought to bear at the individual level through education and networking organizations, many of which are designed for and focus solely on women. But we haven’t seen as much effort at the organizational level, which we believe could be the most determinative lever of change. In fact, we are not aware of a country that has seen effective action in all three. A case in point is New Zealand.

New Zealand’s Challenge

The country has been cited as a standout on the gender-gap front, consistently recognized by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a leader based on evaluation of four domains: economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment, and health and survival. Additionally, the New Zealand government has endeavored for many years to provide support to working women and families, for example, passing the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act in 1987 which mandates paid maternity leave and subsidized daycare for working mothers. In the corporate sphere, the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) implemented the Diversity Listing Rule in 2012 that requires companies to annually report their boards’ gender composition.

Yet, the percentage of women on boards in New Zealand remains in the single digits. Recent estimates put the percentage at 7.5% for female directors and just 5% for women in leadership positions such as Chairperson. In 2012, we surveyed (in partnership with WomenCorporateDirectors and Heidrick and Struggles) more than 1,000 board members in 59 countries including New Zealand. To increase the sample size for a country-focused analysis of New Zealand, we administered the survey to a second wave of New Zealand directors between December 2012 and March 2013.

Subsequently, we examined the challenges that the New Zealand boards have been facing. Our findings point to certain factors that may be contributing to this lack of progress. These analyses, however, should be interpreted with care. Our sample included low numbers of women directors—mirroring the low overall numbers of women on boards in New Zealand. Therefore, the analyses are suggestive, but we hope they will encourage more research and collection of broader data. Our findings:

Different Diagnoses: We discovered an important difference between women and men directors in New Zealand: the diagnosis of the problem. Women said it is because of lack of access to networks and those with decision-making power on boards, while men most frequently said it was due to lack of women in executive ranks—that is, a lack of qualified women.

These differences between male and female respondents were stark: 30% of women directors in New Zealand said lack of access to those with board-level decision-making power was the primary reason the percentage of women on boards is not increasing; just 7% of the men directors agreed. And 40% of New Zealand women directors versus 29% of men cited closed male-oriented networks as the chief problem. Conversely, 31% of men directors said lack of women in executive ranks was the chief reason for the stalled progress; not one woman director named this as a reason.

We also found that a greater percentage of both women and men directors in New Zealand versus global women and men directors said that diversity was not a top priority when recruiting for their boards and the primary reason for the stalled progress–a finding that suggests the disconnect between the organizational and country level processes at work to increase the number of women on boards in New Zealand.

Different Views of Quotas: Women directors in New Zealand, like their female counterparts elsewhere, show far greater support than men for quotas both personally and as effective tools for increasing the number of women on boards. This gender divide is another indicator of the vastly different orientation to the problem and its possible solutions. Not only are female directors more likely to say there are enough qualified women but they’re more likely to think the chief problem sits within the boardroom.

A finding from our 2012 survey offers an intriguing variation on this theme. We discovered that “men in countries with quotas supported them in higher numbers than men in countries without them.” While more research is needed to achieve a deeper understanding of this finding, it might suggest that once male directors experience gender diversity on boards, they might appreciate the different perspectives more than they’d anticipated.

Different Profiles: A substantially smaller percentage of women board directors in New Zealand (56%) than men (84%) were married, fewer had children (72% of women vs. 90% of men) and those that did had fewer children than men (average number of 2.4 children for women vs. 2.7 for men). And strikingly, almost twice as many women than men had advanced degrees (88% vs. 45%, respectively). These differences raise the question: might there be a greater cost paid and higher qualifications needed by women to reach the same level of career achievement as their male colleagues?

We found that New Zealand’s women and men directors had served on average on the same number of boards during their careers but women were currently serving on more boards—by almost one full board. And although men and women directors in New Zealand were serving on the same number of boards in their career, men were sitting on boards longer than women. Last, we found that even though the New Zealand women directors were currently sitting on more boards than men, far fewer held leadership positions on boards.

These findings raise several questions: Although women directors in New Zealand are more highly credentialed and serve on more boards, why do they hold substantially fewer leadership positions on boards? How do we make sense of these results in the context of New Zealand’s ranking as one of the top countries for gender equality in the world? More research is needed to explore these questions.

Simultaneous Action

It may be too soon to tell how effective the NZX’s Diversity Listing Rule will be at increasing the percentage of women on New Zealand’s listed company boards but all boards will benefit from a deliberate and thoughtful implementation of more rigorous, objective, and transparent selection processes for directors. We studied one such process in a large company in New Zealand that was being divided. To create the two new boards, the chairman named a special team to determine and run the selection process. The team began by identifying the skill sets each board would need and then created a model that detailed the expertise and behavioral attributes necessary for each board to execute effectively. Their approach remained rigorous and transparent throughout and in the end both companies appointed boards that were diverse both in skills, attributes and gender.

There is a need for simultaneous intervention at a country, organizational, and individual level in order to make progress in the representation of women on boards. As evident from the data collected from New Zealand, as well as examples from many countries around the world, tackling only one or two levels will not be enough to produce results.

In New Zealand, the government is taking a more proactive role in promoting female board representation, and clearly there is enough qualified female talent in the country (some might argue even more qualified than their male counterparts). What is missing is intervention at the organizational level. Our research revealed several opportunities for improvement within New Zealand’s boards, including identifying and appointing directors with the skills their boards need, effectively onboarding and training new directors, managing their own dynamics, and succession planning practices that include building more diverse governing bodies.

To move towards greater parity, it might be time for boards around the globe to take purposeful action: to open up and expand their selection processes, to recruit and appoint directors with greater diversity of skills, attributes, and gender, and strengthen their overall governance practices. Lest without such intervention at the organizational level, we will continue to say “Another year, another disappointment.”

Methodology

We surveyed more than 1,000 board members in 59 countries. Groysberg and Bell administered the survey to a second wave of New Zealand directors between December 2012 and March 2013. We analyzed the data along several dimensions including geography and specifically for this analysis we did a New Zealand and Global breakout. The average amount of time respondents reported that it took them to achieve their first board service, may have been affected by the involvement of an executive search firm.