Best Progress on Women Directors in France and Spain – Due to Quota Laws?
France and Spain rank best in the latest Corporate Women Directors International study of women directors in Fortune Global 200 companies, the biggest in the world, regarding the progress on female top managers. The new report, presented in November 2011 at the Worldbank, ranks France first for the fastest rate of increase, as it moved from 7.2% board directorships held by women in 2004 to 20.1% in 2011. Coming in second is Spain, where the representation of women on corporate boards increased from 1.9% in 2004 to 9.2% currently. Both countries are among those in Europe that passed quota laws as did Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. In Asia, Malaysia has recently adopted a similar bill in the form of an executive order from the Prime Minister. The leading country, however, remains the U.S. where no quota law exists; the US companies on the Fortune Global 200 post the highest percentage of women directors at 20.8% with P&G (45.6%) and Wellpoint (41.7%) outnumbering even Norwegian Statoil (40%). Despite these results, the report claims that quota laws have been instrumental for the progress.
More European blue chips included in the report’s Top10 are Deutsche Bank, France Telecom, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale and Deutsche Post. For the first time since 2004, an automobile company, General Motors, made it to the Top Ten listing with four women directors out of 11 (36.4%). The report also highlights that more and more companies are moving away from tokenism, with almost a third of companies in the 2011 Fortune listing having three or more female directors. This obviously increases the pressure on those corporation that have no or just one woman on their top team. This pressure should be felt mainly in the petroleum refining industry, where only five women are on the boards of the top six – Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Sinopec, China National Petroleum and Chevron – and only two companies reach higher scores (Norway’s Statoil, 40%, and France’s Total, 26.7%). The report also found, that there are more companies with no women directors among the Fortune Global 200 in 2011 (49) than in 2009. The reason cited is the changing composition of the Fortune Global 200 listing with 31 new companies in 2011, primarily from Asia, the majority of which have zero or only one female director.
