Push for Gender Balance on Boards Gains Steam

By JAMES KANTER Via New York Times
January 24, 2013

BRUSSELS — The proportion of women taking positions on corporate boards in the European Union is rising at the fastest pace in a decade as a push for laws on gender balance gains momentum, the bloc’s top justice official said Thursday.

“The proof is in the pudding: regulatory pressure works,” Viviane Reding, the E.U. justice commissioner, said in a statement to the International Herald Tribune on the eve of her participation in a panel on the role of women in economic decision-making at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Ms. Reding is leading a campaign for legally binding measures to promote gender equality in the top ranks of the European business world. But she has run into vigorous opposition from some E.U. governments, including Britain’s, that prefer that such measures be voluntary.

Ms. Reding had to abandon a proposal in November for legislation that called for punishing companies whose supervisory boards had fewer than 40 percent women. Ms. Reding then proposed that sanctions apply only in cases where companies do not have 40 percent of women on their supervisory boards and fail to enact selection procedures giving priority to a qualified female candidate.

Her appearance at Davos should give her another opportunity to make the case that her amended proposal, which must be approved by the European Parliament and by E.U. governments, should be adopted across Europe.

Belgium, France and Italy, among others, recently adopted legislation encouraging the naming of women to corporate boards and “are starting to show progress,” she told the I.H.T. The evidence “clearly demonstrates that time-limited regulatory intervention can make all the difference,” she said.

In Italy, which adopted a law in 2011 requiring listed and state-owned companies to have women in a third of management and supervisory-board positions by 2015, there was an increase of 4.9 percentage points between January and October last year in the number of women on the boards of listed companies. Even so, Italy remains below the European average, with only 11 percent of those seats occupied by women. Read full article>>