EVERY male manager must have at least one woman on his team under a radical new plan devised by 21 leading male CEOs.

The heads of some of the country's leading employers - including the Commonwealth Bank, the Australian Army and Woolworths - are pushing to increase the share of women in leadership positions and dismantle the old "boys' club" mentality at the top of many organisations.

In a move that will affect more than 550,000 Australian workers, the 21 leaders have committed to ensuring every one of their managers will add at least one woman to their team as jobs become available.

Some leaders, including IBM Australia managing director Andrew Stevens, are going so far as offering bonuses to managers who meet or exceed targets for the number of women in the organisation.

"The plus-one pledge, where you add a woman to your team at every level of your organisation, is a tangible way of (increasing female representation)," Mr Stevens said.

"My hope is that we will inspire male and females to lock on to this issue and make change in their enterprise in both the public and private sector."

The plan is based on a 2011 trial at Citi's Australian offices, where a minimum of one senior woman was promoted into an approved open role.

This drove a 9 per cent year-on-year increase in women senior vice president roles and above in 2011, and a 24 per cent increase in 2012.

Program architect and Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick said from now on, the CEOs would refuse to be part of any speaking panel which didn't have a woman on it.

"This will lift thousands of women's voices. The companies are saying 'please don't come to us if you want our CEO to talk at an all-male event'," she said.

"The men that are in the Male Champions of Change represent hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of employees in this country and it will change the experience of work for mums and dads, their daughters and their sons."

Other pledges include increasing the contact mothers have with their mangers while they are on maternity leave to ensure they don't "fall out of the loop" and questioning when employees with caring responsibilities see their careers flounder.

Some organisations, including Citi, are pushing managers harder to ensure that they get their employees back to work after taking time off.

"At Citi, we were losing too many fantastic women who didn't return after having children," Citi Australia country officer Stephen Roberts said.

"We realised that there is no substitute to me setting and enforcing high expectations of the managers responsible for those taking leave."

Originally published as CEOs to make boys' club history