When Norway
introduced a 40% quota for female directors of listed companies in 2006, to
come into force in 2008, it was a first. Non-complying firms could
theoretically be forcibly dissolved, though none has in fact suffered such a
fate. Since then gender quotas for boards have been imposed in Belgium,
Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain (though with less severe sanctions:
non-complying firms must generally explain in their annual reports why they
fell short and what they plan to do about it). The European Commission is
considering imposing quotas across the EU. Malaysia has imposed a 30% quota for
new appointments to boards, and Brazil a 40% target, though only for
state-controlled firms. The governments of several other countries, including
Australia, Britain and Sweden, have threatened to impose quotas if firms do not
appoint more female directors voluntarily. So why are gender
quotas becoming more common?
One reason is
a growing impatience with the glacial pace of voluntary change: women are the
majority of all graduates almost everywhere in the developed world, but make up
a smaller share of the workforce the further up the corporate ladder they go.
Another is that Norway’s quota law has not been the disaster some predicted.
"As a principle, I don’t like quotas," Ider Kreutzer, the former
chief executive of Storebrand, an insurance group, told the Financial Times the
year after the law came into force. "But I have not been able to find any
big problems with the legislation in practice." Some had worried that they
would actually decrease diversity by forcing companies to dive for the same
small pool of eligible women, nicknamed the "golden skirts". In fact,
Norway still has more "golden trousers"—male directors are twice as
likely to sit on more than one board. Nor did it obviously lead to less
qualified boards: female Norwegian board members are more likely to have a
degree than male ones.
That is not to
say quotas are now uncontroversial. Whether you think robust measures to
increase the share of women in senior management are a good thing in the first
place depends partly on how convinced you are that diversity in management is
important. It might improve performance by mirroring the diversity of
customers—or, as our Schumpeter columnist recently argued (though about
cultural rather than gender diversity), it might increase conflict, worsen
communication and reduce workplace trust. Easier to dismiss is the still-common
objection that quotas are anti-meritocratic: that is more true of the status
quo. Oodles of research demonstrates that women are evaluated less positively
than identically qualified men when applying for stereotypically male jobs,
such as leadership roles. One study found that a commitment by hiring
committees to shortlists with at least 25% women helped to remove anti-woman
bias.
Over time,
advocates of quotas hope that a sudden large increase in the number of women in
leadership will change attitudes. They point to the results of a law passed in
1993 in India that reserved positions for women in randomly selected village councils.
A decade later women were more likely to stand for, and win, elected positions
in those villages that had by chance reserved positions for women in the
previous two elections. But life is likely to be hard for the pioneers. In a
review of the effects of gender targets and quotas, Jennifer Whelan and Robert
Wood of Melbourne Business School found that women who were appointed to senior
management under American affirmative-action policies are seen as "less
qualified, less competent and less legitimate in their role" than their
male colleagues, or women appointed without targets or quotas—though there is
no research evidence that they actually are.
Source: www.economist.com
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