After 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.
“According to estimates by the European Institute for Gender Equality, currently only 30.6 percent of the members of the supervisory board are women and only 8.5 percent of the executive boards in the EU are women,” said the social democrat involved as chief negotiator. If there are more women than men on a committee, men also benefit. Formally, EU states and the European Parliament still have to agree to the agreement.
Change of government in Germany paved the way for the quota
The change of government in Germany was also decisive for the solution. 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 an initiative that was also rejected by the Merkel government. At that time, 15.6 percent of supervisory board members in Germany were women.
The project was put back on the agenda by EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen at the beginning of the year. When the German government blocked the project at the time, the CDU politician was Minister of Labor. 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.