Compared internationally, relatively few women still reach top management in listed companies in Germany – even though many women have the necessary training.
In the top management of the 40 large companies listed in the German stock index DAX, one in four board members is now a woman. According to a study by the Allbright Foundation, Germany still cannot catch up with other western industrialized countries. With a proportion of women of 24.7 percent of the board members of DAX companies as of September 1st, Germany was well behind the leader Great Britain (32.1 percent).
The USA followed in second place (30.1 percent), ahead of France (28.8 percent) and Sweden (28.2 percent). According to the study, only Poland performed worse than Germany, with 18.2 percent of board members being women. Things looked somewhat better on the supervisory boards of DAX companies, where four out of ten members were female.
Hardly any women at the top of executive boards and supervisory boards
If you look at all 160 companies listed in the Dax, MDax and SDax stock market indices together, the proportion of women in board positions increased by 2.3 percentage points to 19.7 percent within one year. This was a weaker increase than in the previous study (plus 3.2 percentage points). As of September 1st, 37 percent of all members of the supervisory bodies of all companies in the DAX family were female. The situation hardly changed when it came to top positions: According to the study, there were ten female supervisory board chairmen (previous year: six) and seven board chairmen as of the reporting date, which is the same number as last year.
In Germany, a lot of time was lost with the quota discussion, explained the managing directors of the Allbright Foundation, Wiebke Ankersen and Christian Berg. German companies would have to focus even more on appropriate measures if they wanted to catch up with international competition.
Companies should set goals and question their own approach
Companies should set themselves as specific internal goals as possible to increase the proportion of women in management positions and also question what structures might stand in the way of this and where there might be problems, said Ankersen. Unconscious prejudices may also have played a role in the selection of managers. The fact that the proportion of women in top management in Germany is still not making good progress is also surprising because more than half of the business administration graduates are female – “and not just since yesterday,” emphasized Ankersen.
It is somewhat optimistic that, for some time now, women have increasingly been included in filling the positions of CFO – a board position that is often a stepping stone to the position of CEO. At Commerzbank, long-time CFO Bettina Orlopp recently moved to the top of the board.
According to its own information, the German-Swedish Allbright Foundation is a politically independent and non-profit foundation based in Stockholm and Berlin. She advocates for more women and diversity in management positions in business.
Source: Stern
