Swedish Government’s patience snapped: Gender quota instead of voluntary action
The Swedish government considers forcing corporate boards to appoint more women after finding voluntary programmes failed to bring about greater gender equality. The Swedish Minister of Finance, Anders Borg, announced a one-year-deadline for all companies to modify their recruitment processes. If gender equality will not improve within this period, Sweden will “gradually move towards being forced to launch quota legislation,” he said. It would be the second European country lately taking the step from a non-binding requirement to a quota system following a perceived slow speed of change. The German right-left Coalition has recently included a gender quota for supervisory boards in their coalition agreement.
While Swedish politics and society rate high on many gender equality scores, their companies still seem to be lagging behind; even if they score second compared to other European countries. About 45 percent of Sweden’s elected officials are female, compared with only 22 percent of senior managers at the country’s 25 biggest companies. But women also make up 24 percent of Sweden’s corporate boards, according to an index by Statistics Sweden measuring 231 publicly traded firms. However, they only head five of the 100 biggest Swedish companies as CEO. One of them, Annika Falkengren, Chief Executive of the Swedish bank Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) questions the tendency to “glorify Sweden” and instead criticises her country for not doing enough to help women succeed in the corporate sphere. At the same time, Mrs. Falkengren is not enthusiastic about a quota; women should not be asked to do a job because a law demands it.
Intense debate around gender equality has gripped Sweden since the chairman of the Swedish Federation of Enterprise, Jens Spendrup, said in a radio interview that one of the reasons fewer women make it to corporate boards is that there’s a lack of competent female candidates. This argument can be easily rejected by looking at the existing equality within government owned companies like Vattenfall, depicting a female share on boards of about 49 percent and 43 percent of board chairpersons being female, according to the government’s website. Apparently, there is no lack of female talent in that business environment.
Taking a look abroad seems to foster Swedish impatience: Norway was the first country in the world to impose a gender quota of 40 percent. This has, however, created mixed results, according to various studies: Some find increased professionalism, others find decreased market value. Some talk about increased normality, others about more pronounced gender conflict. A couple of EU countries followed the Norwegian example (France, Finland, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy) trying to break the glass ceiling by law. In 2011 the United Kingdom set a voluntary 25%-target for its 100 biggest companies that now reached an average female share of 19 percent. This is seen to be similar to French or Dutch companies and far better than Belgian or Italian companies. Hence the effectiveness of legally binding quota is once more challenged – in addition to the not resolved question how to deal with non-compliant or underachieving companies. Here, the Norwegian example is certainly out-of-scope for the EU: there, non-complying companies face the danger of compulsory liquidation by the government…
