EU Women Quota Set To Be Blocked: Report
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The European Union is unlikely to go ahead with a proposal that would have forced publicly-listed companies to ensure a minimum 40 percent presence of women in their corporate boardrooms, said a report by the Financial Times on Sunday.
The proposed legislation, which would have been imposed across the entire EU, faced opposition by at least nine member states, who argued that the issue should be preferably dealt on a national, rather than regional, level.
The European Union is unlikely to go ahead with a proposal that would have forced publicly-listed companies to ensure a minimum 40 percent presence of women in their corporate boardrooms, said a report by the Financial Times on Sunday.
The proposed legislation, which would have been imposed across the entire EU, faced opposition by at least nine member states, who argued that the issue should be preferably dealt on a national, rather than regional, level.
In a strongly-worded letter direct to the European Commission’s president José Manuel Barroso, as well as his deputy Viviane Reding, the nine countries – including the U.K., the Netherlands and Malta – added that each country should find their own way to boost women in business; and said that a mandated quota was “the wrong solution”.
“We agree with the commission’s stance that there are still too few women on the boards of publicly listed companies,” wrote the letter, obtained by FT.
[quote]“[But] we reiterate that any targeted measures in this area should be devised and implemented at national level. Therefore, we do not support the adoption of legally binding provisions for women on company boards at the European level,” it said.[/quote]Related: Infographic: Women Are Finally Taking Over
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According to the report, the governments of Sweden and Germany are also against the proposal though they did not sign the joint letter to the European Commission.
Nevertheless, the nine countries already have the required amount of votes to block the plan, which will come as a blow to Reding personally, as she had been the primary sponsor of the proposal.
“I think we’re slowly running out of patience everywhere in Europe,” Reding said in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year.
[quote]“It’s no secret that in countries where there are legal quotas (for representation on boards), the figures have grown substantially. In countries without obligatory quotas, progress is slow,” she had claimed.[/quote]Related: EU Wants Minimum Quota For Women In Corporate Boardrooms
Related: Italy To Impose Minimum Quota For Women In Corporate Boardrooms
Related: The Economics of Women in the Workplace
According to recent figures by the EU, only 13.7 percent of board members at large listed companies in Europe are women, with some southern European countries such as Italy and Portugal possessing single-digit rates.
Yet business leaders and politicians say that imposing a one-size-fit-all quota would be unfair to specific countries and industries, who would have been forced to impose radical changes due to their weaker starting positions.
Several countries across the EU, including Italy, France and the Netherlands, have already adopted their own national quotas to improve female representation in the boardroom. The group that are against the quota now include: Britain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovenia – and Germany and Sweden.
