Paul Yeung/Reuters
In February, Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann created a firestorm with his remark that more women on corporate boards would make life “more colourful and prettier.” Certainly it would at Ackermann’s bank, Germany’s biggest, whose 12-member executive committee is entirely male. Editorialists and bloggers around the globe slammed the banker for his sexist barb. Less discussed was the serious debate that inspired it: proposed quotas in the German Bundestag that would require the country’s largest publicly traded companies to fill at least 40 per cent of their management and supervisory boards with women, up from a current 8.6 per cent.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has filled one-third of her ministerial positions with women, quashed the proposal. Instead, she offered companies “one last chance” to redress the issue before she imposed legislation. Ackermann’s comment, at least according to his PR people, was intended to support that idea; he was trying to highlight the bank’s achievement of filling 16.5 per cent of management positions with women.
Germany is not alone in focusing on gender imbalances in power echelons. Norway, Spain and Iceland all have imposed quotas in the boardrooms of publicly traded companies. Earlier this month, the EU’s justice commissioner, Viviane Reding, gave public companies 12 months to commit voluntarily to filling 30 per cent of board positions with women by 2015—going up to 40 per cent by 2020 before legislative action is taken. France is already on board: in January, it introduced a law stipulating the boards of its large publicly traded companies be 40 per cent female by 2017. Governments, too, are facing quotas. India’s parliament has passed a bill to reserve 33 per cent of its legislature’s seats for women, up from 10 per cent. Argentina established a 30 per cent female quota; Uganda reserves a percentage of seats in its 39 districts for women.
Suddenly, it seems, the vast estrogen deficit in business and government has reached a flashpoint. True, the disparity is severe: in Canada, women represent more than half of university graduates and comprise half of the workforce. Girls are raised believing they can achieve anything—become an astronaut or prime minister. Strapping on a space pack offers better odds of liftoff: only 21 per cent of Canadian MPs are women, a rate little changed over five elections. Women hold a mere 14 per cent of board seats and 17 per cent of senior officer roles on FP 500 corporations; close to half of these companies have no female directors at all. The trend is echoed globally: in the U.S., 15 per cent of corporate directors are women, in Britain, it’s 12.5 per cent. The pace of change is glacial; at current rates, it’ll be some 50 years before gender parity is reached.
Not that parity is even the goal. Politicians in France, the cradle of egalité, voted on a watered-down version of the original proposal for full gender equality. In February, Canadian Liberal Sen. Céline Hervieux-Payette saw her bill to establish full gender parity on boards, financial institutions and Crown corporations soundly defeated. The very term “gender equity” was eliminated by the Harper government in its communications, replaced by the cumbersome “equality of men and women,” a phrase absent of any strident feminist connotations.
