① Europe is not a gender-equality heaven. In particular, the corporate workplace will never be completely family-friendly until women are part of senior management decisions, and Europe’s top corporate-governance positions remain overwhelmingly male. Indeed, women hold only 14 per cent of positions on European corporate boards.
② The European Union is now considering legislation to compel corporate boards to maintain a certain proportion of women – up to 60 per cent. This proposed mandate was born of frustration. Last year, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding issued a call to voluntary action. Reding invited corporations to sign up for gender balance goals of 40 per cent female board membership. But her appeal was considered a failure: only 24 companies took it up.
③ Do we need quotas to ensure that women can continue to climb the corporate ladder fairly as they balance work and family?
④ “Personally, I don’t like quotas,” Reding said recently. “But I like what the quotas do.” Quotas get action: they “open the way to equality and they break through the glass ceiling,” according to Reding, a result seen in France and other countries with legally binding provisions on placing women in top business positions.
⑤ I understand Reding’s reluctance – and her frustration. I don’t like quotas either; they run counter to my belief in meritocracy, governance by the capable. But, when one considers the obstacles to achieving the meritocratic ideal, it does look as if a fairer world must be temporarily ordered.
⑥ After all, four decades of evidence has now shown that corporations in Europe as well as the US are evading the meritocratic hiring and promotion of women to top positions – no matter how much “soft pressure” is put upon them. When women do break through to the summit of corporate power – as, for example, Sheryl Sandberg recently did at Facebook – they attract massive attention precisely because they remain the exception to the rule.