Danish companies want to recruit more women to top posts

Carlsberg, Lego and Bang & Olufsen promise to recruit more women to leading posts within their companies. The three Danish companies have, together with several other leading Danish firms, signed the document ‘Recommendations for more women on corporate boards’. They thereby promise to increase the proportion of female candidates for board posts, to monitor the development in their annual reports, to be open about recruitment and selection criteria, to increase the proportion of female managers and to encourage others to also sign the recommendations.

The recommendations are drawn up under the leadership of Minister for Gender Equality Lykke Friis. Photo: Johannes Jansson/norden.org

“We have approached these problems in an entirely new way by gathering those agents who in practice decide who is to fill the board posts in several  Danish companies, that is, the institutional owners, the capital funds, board chairs and head-hunter firms", says Minister for Gender Equality Lykke Friis.

“Together we’ve formulated a set of rules that obliges those working at all links of the recruitment chain to look much more intensively for qualified candidates when posts on the board are to be filled. This has resulted in a set of usable and very concrete recommendations, which I feel convinced, will lead to an increased diversity on the boards.”

In Norway a quota model has been introduced, according to which at least 40 per cent of the board members must be women. But Lykke Friis does not support the idea of quotas:

“We can’t handle this kind of challenge by sitting in parliament and deciding what the world should look like. Instead we have put together a set of recommendations, which are directly based on the corporate reality. Thus we get the best solutions going while the companies themselves also carry their responsibility. That is a far more efficient way forward”, says Lykke Friis.

Uncontroversial quota in Norway

The quota amendment came into force in Norway in 2008. In autumn 2009 the Insitute for Social Research did a survey among all board members of Norwegian public limited companies (ASA) to map recruitment patterns, experiences and attitudes to the board's work among the board members.

The results show that a vast majority of board members are neutral or positive to the quota regulations. Most board members state that they have not noted any greater changes after the quota was introduced.

"New perspectives being put forward and more discussion on the boards are among the positive experiences. For the few who are negative to the quota regulation (mostly men), the most frequently mentioned challenge is that women who have recently joined the board, lack important skills and insights", write the researchers behind the report Vibeke Heidenreich and Aagoth Storvik.

Among those sceptic to the quota model, it is often pointed out that public limited companies will be inclined to re-register as private limited companies (AS) to avoid the quota requirements. This is however dismissed by the Norwegian researchers.  

"Fewer than one in ten board members of ASA-companies that are not registered on the stock exchange, said that the requirements of gender balance among the board members was part of the reason to re-register as a private limited company", Heidenreich and Storvik write.