Germany Moves Toward Requiring Women On Large Companies’ Executive Boards

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German Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth Franziska Giffey during the meeting of the German cabinet on Wednesday in Berlin. The cabinet approved a draft law that would require women on the executive boards of large publicly held companies.

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«We have seen for years, not many changes are made voluntarily, and progress is very slow,» Giffey said in a statement.

An October 2020 report by the AllBright Foundation, which advocates for boardroom diversity, found that Germany lags the U.S., France, the U.K., Poland and Sweden in the proportion of women on executive boards at leading companies.

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The study found that in the U.S., women comprise 28.6% of the executive boards of the 30 largest publicly traded companies. In Germany, that figure is just 12.8%. And only four of Germany’s largest 30 listed companies had more than one woman on their executive boards.

Janina Kugel, a former Siemens executive who is now an equality advocate, told Deutsche Welle the new quota would be an important signal.

«The perception of Germany is that, because we’ve had a female chancellor for the last 15 years, Germany is very progressive in that matter, but actually it is not,» she said.

The U.S. has also begun to confront the issue of gender disparity in boardrooms.

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In 2018, California became the first U.S. state to require companies based there to have women on their boards of directors.

And the U.S. stock exchange Nasdaq announced diversity requirements last month. Under the rule submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nasdaq would require companies traded on its exchange to appoint at least one woman and at least one member of an ethnic or racial minority or LGBTQ+ person to their boards of directors.

• gender equality
• Germany