ABSTRACT
Human Relation (HR) as a function is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the term human resources coming into usage during the 1980s to replace the previous title of personnel. This renaming was driven by the implementation of the Ulrich model. There are few such articles accusing the finance director of caring about numbers more than people or telling the chief information officer that there are other things in life than computers or digital data. Many of the derogatory articles about HR in the boardroom comment on ‘HR speak’, with an implicit assumption that soft or ambiguous language is of lesser value. Given the high proportion of women who are HR directors, it would not have been unreasonable for boards to have addressed the pressure for female representation through promoting their female HR directors to the board.
