These numbers can be looked at one way or the other. One could say positively: the competition for female board members is increasing, especially the large companies are making an effort and even spending money to recruit top managers from outside or to promote them to the highest posts within their own company.
One in five board positions in the Dax is now occupied by a woman, as counted by the German-Swedish Allbright Foundation, which specializes in promoting women in board positions. For the first time there are listed companies in which power is divided equally between men and women.
On the negative side, one could say that more than half of the 160 companies listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange still have not a single woman on the board. They too want to sell their products to women, but don’t think it’s necessary to get them into top management. The proportion of women on the 160 executive boards only recorded a meager increase of 0.8 percentage points last year, it was 14.2 percent on September 1, 2022. More than 85 percent of the board members are still men.
Wiebke Ankersen, Managing Director of the Allbright Foundation, warns that those who are already lagging behind are in danger of falling behind completely. “Women like to go where other women are already. There’s just a much higher chance that they’ll find teams that are practiced in various ways of working together.” Being the only woman in a very homogeneous Executive Board team with up to six or seven men is an effort that one is happy to avoid if possible. “And it works today because there are more and more alternatives.”
To name a few: It is easier for a woman to be appointed to the Management Board of Fresenius Medical Care, which already consists of three women and three men and is led by one woman, than at Hello Fresh or Munich Re, where you alone among those wearing ties. 62 of the 99 German board members are the only woman on their board team.
“Most managers just want to do a good job.”
According to Ankersen, the lack of will is not generally the reason for the German stock exchange groups. “Most companies now want women on the board. When the first woman is there, they are still often surprised that it actually means a change.” The German board members are very homogeneous, very male and also very uniform in terms of age, origin and education. Most of them studied business administration at one of the two large elite universities and already know each other from corners. “They understand each other without many words because they are all very similarly socialized,” says Ankersen. “Women are socialized differently and often behave differently.” On the one hand, this is the core of the diversity efforts. After all, it’s not just about fairness, it’s primarily about results: mixed teams work better because they discuss things differently and more controversially and question the traditional, as a large-scale study by the management consultancy McKinsey shows.
But that’s also exhausting, says Ankersen. “The more teams are used to working with women, the more likely it is that women can just be managers there and don’t have to be pioneers all the time.”
30 percent is considered the magic limit: When the underrepresented group in a team reaches this percentage, the team culture changes and the people then no longer constantly represent their group, but are allowed to be individuals. “Most female managers simply want to do a good job and not have to constantly deal with the male-dominated structures.”
It should therefore be easier for the three large DAX companies, which had a balanced ratio of men and women on the board of directors for the first time in September 2022, i.e. Continental, Fresenius Medical Care and Siemens Healthineers, to recruit new female managers. The Allbright Foundation considers a proportion of women of at least 40 percent to be balanced. Three other German companies are only a short distance from this: Beiersdorf, Deutsche Telekom and Mercedes Benz.
The majority of the newly appointed board members chose DAX companies. On the other hand, the small and medium-sized companies on the stock exchange are not as good as the Dax companies in recruiting women for their top management. At the MDax and SDax companies, only one in ten board members is a woman. 74 out of 81 companies without women on the board are listed in the MDax and SDax. However, an improvement is foreseeable: The MDax and SDax companies have announced that they will appoint a total of 14 new board members by the end of January 2023.
The salaries also show how tough the competition for female top managers is. So got according to one Analysis by the Technical University of Munich and the German Association for the Protection of Securities (DSW) the female board members last year with an average of 3.6 million euros even slightly more than their male colleagues with 3.5 million – not including the chairmen of the board. If you count the bosses, the men are ahead. The top earner in German stock exchange companies is also a man: Steve Angel, the boss of Linde, received 19.4 million euros in 2021.
Internationally, Germany is left behind
If you compare the 40 largest stock exchange companies in the countries with each other, in Germany these are the Dax companies, the USA is still clearly ahead, with 31 percent of the posts held by women. Great Britain follows with 27.9 percent and Sweden with 26.5 percent. With a share of 20.2 percent, Germany is lagging behind; on September 1, 2022, only Poland was worse with 16.1 percent.
Seven DAX companies have still not managed to get a single woman onto the board: Hello Fresh, Linde, MTU, Munich Re, Porsche Automobil Holding, Sartorius and Symrise. However, the large German companies have the opportunity to catch up: around 100 board positions in the 160 listed companies are filled every year. However, given the average rate of change over the past five years, it would still take another 26 years for women to make up 50 percent of the 160 executive boards of listed companies.