NAfter years of deadlock, negotiators from EU countries and the EU Parliament have agreed on binding quotas for women in the EU for management positions in listed companies. Specifically, the states should be able to choose between two models by 2026. Either at least 40 percent of the members of non-executive supervisory board members should be women, as Vice President of the EU Parliament Evelyn Regner announced on Tuesday evening. The other possibility is to achieve an average proportion of women of 33 percent for supervisory boards and executive boards. If you don’t follow the rules, you have to pay.
Such a requirement is long overdue: “According to estimates by the European Institute for Gender Equality, currently only 30.6 percent of the members of the supervisory board are female and only 8.5 percent of the executive boards in the EU are women,” said the Social Democrat, who was the chief negotiator in the negotiations .
The project is gender neutral. In other words, if there were more women than men on a relevant committee, men would also benefit from the regulation. Formally, EU states and the European Parliament still have to agree to the agreement.
The change of government in Germany was also decisive for the agreement that has now been reached. Under ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), Germany still stood in the way of an agreement. The EU Commission tried to introduce binding rules around ten years ago. Under the then EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, there was a corresponding initiative, which was also rejected by the federal government under Merkel. At that time, only 15.6 percent of supervisory board members in Germany were women.
Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen put the project back on the agenda at the beginning of the year – i.e. shortly after the new federal government was sworn in. When the German government under Merkel blocked the project, the CDU politician was Labor Minister.
In Germany there has been a women’s quota for supervisory boards since 2015 – 30 percent for particularly large companies. In addition, the former grand coalition of Union and SPD agreed last year on a quota for board members. However, there is criticism that companies can avoid this quota by converting into a European company.
