There will be a European women’s quota for business leaders. In an agreement between EU countries and the European Parliament, it has been agreed that 40 percent of the supervisory boards of listed companies must soon be women. Or that both a third of the supervisory directors and a third of the members of the executive board must be women.
Companies that do not meet that quota must fear punitive measures. For example, a Member State can impose fines or block the appointment of men in companies until there are enough women.
The agreement aims to break the glass ceiling in Europe. However, the agreement still has to receive official approval from Parliament and the Member States.
For years, countries such as the Netherlands and Germany were opposed to the negotiations on the women’s quota. Nevertheless, the Netherlands had already introduced a quota before the European Union: since the turn of the year, one in three supervisory directors of large companies in the Netherlands must be a woman.
The expectation is therefore that the quota will not change much for Dutch companies in practice. The Netherlands will even be given two more years to achieve the EU’s target, because it had already started working with such a quota itself.
In many other EU countries there is still a lot of work to be done. In Cyprus, for example, on average only one in twelve directors of large companies is female. In the EU, that average is three out of ten drivers.