Equal Time: Gender Equality’s Final Frontier

Jennifer Cocks

2:05 pm

November 19, 2010

This article discusses the problem of gender inequality and representation in European politics, business, and media. In many European Union member states, quotas have been instituted to increase the number of women in higher government positions; this program has overall been successful as “European Union as a whole, women now hold 26% of elected seats versus 14% in the US.” The newest concern and the primary focus of the article is highlighting the gender disparity in the boardroom of European businesses: “Only 3% of the top FTSE companies in the U.K. have female executive directors. Even [in] Sweden… only 2% of CEOs are women.” This is a trend in other E.U. nations, most likely due to the cultural emphasis on family over career. Though many businesses claim that gender is not a hiring factor, European nations are considering or have already implemented quota legislation that requires top performing companies to hire more women for upper management positions. Norway’s government offered the 600 best performing companies the choice to fix their boardroom disparities within a year or face a legal quota system requiring 40% of top positions to be held by women; failure to do so within the allotted grace period would result in the loss of the organization’s business license (businesses failed to increase women in the boardroom and Parliament is now scheduled to vote in the quota legislation). Other ideas have been recommended to reduce gender discrimination, including “the recent European Commission proposal to outlaw sexist stereotypes in the media and remove gender from insurance-premium calculations.”

I think the proposals for gender equality in Europe are progressive and liberal, especially when compared to our own governmental system. Several of my previous blogs address female representation in government, so I won’t re-hash those article responses. As far as the business quota system to introduce more women to the boardroom, I believe it is a good theory, but boardroom executives also need the knowledge and expertise to make the important strategic decisions. If women haven’t penetrated into the almost-upper management level to gain that expertise, then promoting them to high positions will be a superficial achievement that doesn’t actually benefit the women in society or the company itself. If the quota system was geared more towards boosting women’s enrollment in business colleges and universities and introducing succession policies in businesses to groom more women for the executive positions in organizations, then it would be more effective at equalizing the gender disparity of upper management. Current enrollment of women in the London Business School is in the range of 20-30 percent according to the article; education is central to the success of these business quota policies and is necessary to ‘level the playing field’ effectively. No doubt that patriarchal societies require some legal recourse to promote gender parity when cultural norms aren’t evolving quickly enough to support dramatic change; however the business gender quota seems overly aggressive- at least in the time businesses are given to rectify their disparate treatment and disparate impact. It will be interesting to see if the proposal to outlaw sexist stereotypes in media will pass, as enforcing that does run the risk of appearing like government censorship. With the growing popularity of the media, I think addressing the sexist stereotypes will eventually help European society change its cultural norms to be more egalitarian towards both sexes.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,485708,00.html