“Last Chance” for a Voluntary Increase of Women on EU Boards
Following her strong statements about potential quota for women on executive and supervisory boards, Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Justice, announced a Europe-wide voluntary initiative, that aims at increasing the representation of women on corporate boards of publicly listed companies. Businesses chosing to enter into the voluntary agreement called “Women on the Board Pledge for Europe” commit themselves to increase the number of female board members in their organisations to 30 percent by 2015, with the further objective of increasing it to 40 percent by 2020. The pledge was announced after Commissioner Reding’s meeting with business leaders and social partners. It gives publicly listed companies the opportunity to devise strategies to create more gender equality on their boards without external regulatory intervention. According to the European Commission’s Vice-President, the Pledge is “a last chance” for self-regulation. Reding emphasised her desire for employers to “get creative” in appointing more women to the boardroom, so that regulators do not have to. Currenlty only 12 percent of the board members at Europe’s largest companies are female, and only 3 percent of these boards are chaired by a woman.
Norway, France and Spain have already seen regulatory intervention to raise women’s participation and Reding stressed that such approaches could be adopted on a European level if the “Women on The Board Pledge for Europe” proves ineffective. On March 8th 2012 “the [European] Commission will assess whether there is significant progress and whether credible self-regulatory initiatives were developed to enhance women’s participation in decision making,” Commisioner Reding said.
The Pledge is available for download at the European Commission’s website (http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/reding/pdf/p_en.pdf) and can be signed by all publicly listed companies in Europe.
The Pledge comes after the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality expressed its belief that a quota system will ensure women are adequately represented in the public and private sectors. The committee also stressed the need for more female politicans in the decision making bodies of EU member states, where the average number of women representatives in lower houses of parliament is below 23 percent.
