CherryPanda
Senior Member
- Aug 12, 2014
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Women deserve more seats in the highest corporate echelons. But a mandate is the wrong way to get there.
Germany seems to disagree. After months of debate, the German cabinet last week imposed a quota for women on big companies’ boards. The policy was a response to the fact that women are currently underrepresented in leadership positions: They comprise 46 percent of the labor force but hold just 15 percent of supervisory-board seats at Germany’s 200 biggest companies.
Germany is not the first to implement such a policy; Norway instituted corporate board quotas several years ago. France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands followed suit. There is periodic agitation forimporting such policies to the United States , too.
At first blush, these types of quotas seem like they should be good for women, good for corporate governance and good for entire countries that are now underutilizing the human capital of the Second Sex.
Multiple studies, after all, have found that corporations with more womenon their boards tend to do better. Exactly why is unclear; maybe greater diversity produces more robust debate, leading to better decision-making. Or maybe the fact that having more women on a corporate board reflects other ways that a company is more forward-looking.
So far, though, research suggests that forcing companies to appoint women onto their boards has been somewhere between unhelpful and damaging, both to women aspiring to leadership roles and for the companies themselves.
One of the objectives behind such quotas is to improve the career and pay prospects of women further down the line, but a recent study of Norway’s system finds no evidence of a trickle-down effect for other high-achieving women or on the marital, fertility and career plans of other women. Quotas may, in fact, hurt women’s opportunities if they lead to women being perceived as unqualified, unwanted diversity hires.
In Norway, dozens of companies chose to delist from the stock exchange, apparently to avoid being subject to the quota. And among those companies that opted to stay public, quotas were associated with worse corporate performance. They “led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance,” one study found.
Why having quotas may hurt women in the corporate boardroom - The Washington Post
An interesting opinion on the issue, from my point of view. I mean, I have always considered this idea of quotas as something not healthy and even damaging. Too often in the race for equality our law makers forget about common sense.
As one can see from the article, European law makers have this problem too.
So, do you think that small number of women in the highest corporate echelons is because of the discriminations, or women are just less ambitious, or there are other obstacles?