Women NOT embarrassed by quota law!

There isn’t much to say about the recent law on gender quotas in public joint stock companies. It has been introduced, and it works, says Siri Fürst, board member in one of Norway’s approximately 400 joint stock companies.

By Siri Lindstad

Siri Fürst works as a strategy and business development specialist at the company Considium Consulting Group Ltd. In addition, she is one of the still small, but steadily growing number of women who serve on the boards of public joint stock companies.

And she is a supporter of the law which since 1 January 2008 stipulates that all public joint stock companies must have a board consisting of at least 40 per cent of each gender.

“If the law hadn’t been introduced, we would never have reached the targets that all agree are important to reach,” says Fürst. She has long and varied experience from both small and large companies, as manager and board member. At the moment, she is on the board of, among others, Pronova BioPharma ASA.

Produces more qualified candidates

Her most important argument for the benefit of there being more women on corporate boards is that this will result in many more qualified candidates to choose among.

The fact is that women might be on the boards of Norwegian companies based on the quota law, but they are not in the least embarrassed by it. On the contrary.

“Almost all the women I have spoken to, regardless of when they have been appointed board members, answer that they think they have been chosen to fill the quota. This is true also of those with long board experience, reaching back to the 1970s and 1980s. They think the company has considered it a positive thing for their profile to have a female board member. Many of those who have been appointed during the last two years think that they wouldn’t have been invited if the law hadn’t been in place. Of course, they themselves know that they are qualified,” says Vibeke Heidenreich. She is a postgraduate student at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo within the project Gender Quotas on Boards of Large Joint Stock Companies: Democracy vs. Inclusion? The project is headed by Mari Teigen and Fredrik Engelstad and runs for the period 2008–2011. For her part of the project, Vibeke Heidenreich interviews women who serve on the boards of public joint stock companies; both those who already were on a board before the law came into force, and those who were probably appointed as a consequence of it.

Nobody is exempt

One day the Norwegian public joint stock companies woke up to a new law requiring there to be a proportion of at least 40 per cent of each gender on their boards. Actually, the law had been in the making for some time and had been introduced gradually in the wake of a long political debate in the country. But nevertheless there were companies who started to prepare for action only in the autumn of 2007; from 1 January 2008 nobody was exempt. Women were now required to enter onto the boards.

This did indeed happen, and obviously without any major difficulties. Female board member candidates proved not to be that scarce; they had just not previously been in the field of vision of the recruiters.
“I have a hypothesis that the appointment committees now work much more systematically in finding board members, and this includes finding both men and women. Therefore I expect there to be a continued positive impact in that the entire process will become more systematic and professionalised,” says Heidenreich.

She describes the women she has interviewed as “very qualified”.
“They are recruited in the same way as men, through professional networks, and only in exceptional cases by head hunting firms.”

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Source: NIKK/ by,