Dusseldorf What do Stephanie Cossmann, Christine Giesen and Tania von der Goltz have in common? All three were recently appointed to the boards of Dax companies. Stephanie Cossmann is the chief HR officer at Symrise, Tania von der Goltz is CFO at Heidelberger Druckmaschinen and Christine Giesen is HR director at Metro.
And all three have been sought and found by the world’s leading headhunters. Giesen by consultants from the market leader Egon Zehnder, Cossmann and von der Goltz by representatives of the US consulting firms Russell Reynolds and Spencer Stuart.
They stand for a trend: Headhunters are playing an increasingly important role in increasing the proportion of women in the management floors of German business. The proportion of women on the executive boards of the 160 largest German listed companies in the Dax, MDax and SDax has never been higher. This is also the work of headhunters. They place more and more successful women in the management floors.
Five years ago, the proportion of women among the new board members they placed in the Dax, MDax and SDax was 14 percent. Between January 2022 and March 2023 it was already 46 percent.
This is the result of a study by the Allbright Foundation, a non-profit institution based in Stockholm and Berlin that campaigns for more women and diversity in management positions in business.
33 new board members recruited externally by headhunters
In addition to Giesen, Cossmann and von der Goltz, examples include Sabine Minarsky (Commerzbank), Anne-Laure de Chammard (Siemens Energy), Sara Hennicken (Fresenius), Grita Loebsack (Beiersdorf), Sharon Ooi (Hannover Rück) and Dagmar Steinert ( Rheinmetall). She and 24 other board members newly appointed between January 2022 and March 2023 were searched for and presented externally by headhunters and selected by the responsible supervisory board members.
For Wiebke Ankersen, co-managing director of the Allbright Foundation, one thing is clear: “Companies are trying to compensate for their years of deficits in promoting women by using personnel consultancies.”
That may work in the short term, according to Ankersen. In the medium and long term, however, there is no way around “the companies themselves systematically building up a much larger pool of female managers at all levels”.
Headhunting also in male hands
Especially since the headhunters themselves have some catching up to do. The five leading HR consultancies worldwide, Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds Associates and Spencer Stuart, which also dominate the German market, not only exclusively bear the names of their male founders.
They are still very male in this country today – and also have to transform themselves. The heads of Germany are all men. The lower management levels are also largely male-dominated. At Egon Zehnder, for example, six out of seven offices in Germany are managed by men. Only the Munich office is managed by a woman, Elke Hofmann.
“The direction is right, the pace isn’t,” explains Egon-Zehnder Germany boss Hanns Goeldel on request. There are reasons for this, which the study rightly points out. And he promises: “We continue to drive change out of inner conviction.”
One of the reasons for the male dominance among personnel consultants is the adherence to the structures of the so-called Deutschland AG for too long, when a few older white men decided on promotions and relegations in the German boardrooms.
Only the HR consultancy Odgers Berndtson from Great Britain, which is somewhat less well established in Germany, is managed by a woman with Katja Hanns-Terrill. The partnership has thus made a placement in its own right, which could be worthwhile.
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Hanns-Terrill reports: “The explicit demand for female consultants for executive search mandates is increasing. This is especially true when it comes to recruiting women for top management positions.”
Almost every second new board member comes from abroad
In addition to Odgers Berndtson, the German consultancy Kienbaum also has a mixed management duo with Fabian Kienbaum and Bibi Hahn. However, Kienbaum no longer plays a major role in filling Dax board positions.
The competition for female executives is fierce among companies and thus also among headhunters. After all, there are still relatively few women on executive boards who have to be willing to change positions.
According to the Allbright study, half of the new board members are currently found in foreign companies where there are already more women at the top level than in German ones.
Examples of this are Anne-Laure de Chammard, who came to Siemens Energy from the French energy group Engie, Sharon Ooi, who switched to Hannover Re from Swiss Re, Grita Loebsack, who came to Beiersdorf from the French eyewear manufacturer Essilor Luxottica, and Christine Giesen, who joined Metro from BP.
According to the analysis, recruiting external women is no more risky than recruiting external men, and is usually even more successful for companies. Relatively fewer women than men who have been appointed to boards of directors from outside the company in the past five years have already left the company management. Only 16 percent of women gave up their position, but 30 percent of men.
“We can’t say for sure why that is,” says Ankersen. Possible explanations for this are that women are screened more closely before they are hired, are more adaptable – or that companies make more effort not to lose them again straight away.
The study also dispels the assumption that women leave management positions more quickly than men – a prejudice that has often been expressed in the past when prominent top women gave up their board positions after a short time.
In 2022, for example, Carla Kriwet was one of such hotly debated personalities. The top manager moved from Bosch Siemens Hausgeräte to Fresenius Medical Care and resigned after a few weeks. Allegedly, there were differences over the company’s strategy.
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