Berlin Company board members in Germany have become more female – even if the legal minimum for women only comes into effect from August of this year. In the fourth quarter of last year, there were 139 female executives in the 200 companies with the highest sales – 38 more than a year earlier, according to the current female manager barometer from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).
Wrohlich and her colleagues Virginia Sondergeld from the DIW and Anja Kirsch from the FU Berlin already see “anticipation effects” of the statutory minimum participation. From August, listed companies that have a supervisory board with equal co-determination and at least four board positions must have at least one woman on the board.
66 companies are currently affected by this regulation. Twelve of them, who still had an exclusively male management team in autumn 2020, have a woman on the board a year later. 19 companies have not yet met the minimum participation that will apply from August. The other companies already had at least one female board member before autumn 2020.
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Nevertheless, the new gender quota seems to be “an effective tool to increase the proportion of women in top-level bodies,” emphasized Sondergeld. Because while companies that are subject to statutory regulations increased the proportion of women on their executive boards by around five percentage points to 19 percent within a year, the proportion in the other companies rose by just under three percentage points to around 14 percent. Across all top 200 companies, the proportion of women on the executive boards is 14.7 percent, in the 40 Dax companies it is 17.5 percent.
Quota for women brings success
The gender quota for the supervisory boards has also had an effect. Since 2016, at least 30 percent of the members of the supervisory bodies of listed and co-determined companies have to be women. In the companies where the regulation applies, the proportion of women on the supervisory boards is now 35 percent. In the companies without a quota, the proportion is only 27 percent.
At the end of last year, the 200 companies with the highest sales broke the threshold of 30 percent female supervisory board members for the first time. However, the momentum in the appointment of women to the supervisory bodies has recently slowed down somewhat. Little is happening at the top of the supervisory board either: while only eight of the top 200 companies were headed by a woman at the end of 2020, a year later there were ten.
Compared to other European countries, the researchers still see some catching up to do in Germany. The scope of the German quota regulations is “very narrow” in a European comparison, said DIW researcher Wrohlich. In nine of the 27 EU countries there are legal regulations for a minimum participation of women in managerial positions.
In many of these countries, however, quotas apply to all listed companies or from a certain company size, while the group of companies affected in this country is comparatively small due to the additional criterion of equal co-determination.
Wrohlich and her colleagues therefore advocate that EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, together with the French Council Presidency, now wants to restart an initiative for a European quota for women that has been on hold for almost ten years. If, for example, the group of companies subject to a quota system were to increase in Germany as well, this would be welcomed.
Quota alone is not enough
In addition to quota regulations, however, “further accompanying measures, especially in family policy” are necessary in order to bring more women into management positions, emphasized Wrohlich. This includes, for example, an extension of the paternity leave for parental allowance or a reform of the spouse splitting.
So far, the researchers have not observed that companies are downsizing their management bodies in anticipation of the minimum board composition that will apply from August in order to overturn the legal regulation. On the contrary, many companies would have created additional board positions, for example for digital.
The researchers also see no evidence that there are insufficiently qualified women for a minimum of board members. The Institute for Labor Market and Vocational Research (IAB) has only just shown that there is a high proportion of women at the second management level – and thus also a reservoir from which female candidates for top positions can be drawn.
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