By Anne Winsnes Rødland
According to Danish gender researchers, the proposal by the Social Democrats has broken a taboo in Danish public life.
“In recent years, it’s been totally impossible to put forward suggestions on gender quotas,” says Elisabeth Møller Jensen, Director of KVINFO, to Dagbladet Information.
The Social Democrats suggested that Danish companies listed on the stock exchange should get four years to reach a 40 per cent proportion of women on their boards. If they failed to do this, the company would face forced dissolution.
“Gender equality develops too slowly in the boardrooms. We have seen that the little push that the legislation gave Norwegian companies has had an impact. This is what we need in Denmark, too,” says the Social Democrat Chair Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
Even if Gender Equality Minister Karen Jespersen (Venstre, Denmark’s Liberal Party) understands that women are impatient, she dismisses the suggested quota system.
“I think there are far better methods to pursue,” she says to Dagbladet Information. Soon after the Social Democratic suggestion on gender quotas, Karen Jespersen instead introduced a new charter to get more women onto company boards and into management structures. It has been developed in co-operation between the Gender Equality Minister, five private companies and five public organisations. The aim is that at least 100 companies will have joined by the year 2010.
“By signing the charter, they commit themselves to working towards getting more women managers at all levels. The charter includes concrete objectives for the work, in order to achieve visible results,” says Jespersen.
Today, there are only 48 women on the boards of Danish listed companies. The proportion of women thus amounts to 5.6 per cent.
As a comparison, the law on gender balance on the boards of Norwegian public companies has resulted in there being 64 Danish
women on the boards of Norwegian listed companies.
In Sweden, the proportion of women on the boards of listed companies is still under 20 per cent.
“It’s obvious that the businesses are not managing to shed the patriarchal pattern of thinking. We need political decisions in order to achieve some change,” says Gudrun Schyman, spokesperson for Feminist Initiative, to Dagens Nyheter. She thinks Norway provides a model with the law on a 40 per cent proportion of women on the boards of public companies.
The proportion of women on the boards of Swedish listed companies is 18.2 per cent. Last year, it was 18.3 per cent. It thus seems that the proportion remains unchanged, even if the statistics for this year are based on information from only about half of the companies.
Although there are no propositions for a law on gender quotas on Swedish corporate boards, the previous – Social Democratic – government prepared the ground for this just before the government change in 2006. Investigator Catarina af Sandeberg recommended that a requirement of at least a 40 per cent representation of both sexes would, at the first stage, pertain to public joint stock companies with many shareholders and to totally state-owned companies.
The debate on a possible quota law died down when the right-wing and centre parties won the election in the following year.
“The proportion of women on boards was increasing strongly up to 2005. In the last two years, however, during the term of the centre-right majority government, the increase has stagnated. It might prove difficult for the present government to explain that the recruitment of women stopped when the debate petered out,” says researcher Marit Hoel, Director of the Center for Corporate Diversity. She thinks that the Social Democrats will put forward a proposition if they win the election again in 2010. Researcher Mari Teigen from the Institute for Social Research is not so convinced.
“It’s actually very interesting to compare Norway and Sweden. In Sweden, there is a much more intense and controversial gender equality debate than in Norway. Nevertheless, it is Norway who has introduced gender quotas, which is regarded as a radical measure,” she points out. Teigen thinks this can be explained by Norway having a strong tradition of government intervention, and that the population can be said to be more supportive of the state.
“Those trying to create a change are likely to form strong alliances with the state. In addition, Norway has had quotas for public boards and committees for several years, which is not the case in Sweden. I doubt that the Swedes would have introduced quotas even if the Social Democratic government had been re-elected,” says Teigen.
As to Denmark, Marit Hoel thinks that a possible law on quotas lies a long way ahead. She does note, however, that much depends
on the government constellations.
Anne Winsnes Rødland is a journalist and former Information Officer at NIKK.
This article has been published in NIKK magasin 1 2009 © NIKK
