Caso a Caso Periodismo de Investigación
In addition, the adoption of the Quota Act itself draws attention to the issue of gender equality in the workplace. This increased importance could lead men and women in decision-making positions to change their views on the importance of addressing gender equality issues. The European Commission presented its first proposal for a 40% quota for women on supervisory boards in 2012, but the plan was blocked by large member states such as Germany and the UK. An unintended positive consequence of the ten-year period it took for the directive on the presence of women on company boards to be that it launched a living experiment to test the medium-term impact of gender quotas on companies. Around the time the directive was first introduced, a group of EU member states passed their own laws requiring greater diversity on boards through gender quotas. A second group of EU members set “soft quotas” in the form of targets, while the other EU members did neither. The figure at the top of this blog, created using data from the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), shows the percentage of women on the boards of large listed companies for each of these three EU member groups. Gender quotas can encourage company management to give more importance to gender issues. The European Union has agreed to introduce gender quotas to ensure that women hold at least 40% of the seats on the boards of large companies. As part of a landmark agreement on gender equality, the EU should pass legislation imposing mandatory quotas on companies to ensure that women hold at least 40% of board seats. Annette Young talks to Carlien Scheele of the European Institute for Gender Studies about what this means for EU companies. As the Taliban continue to ban girls over the age of 11 from attending school, we are meeting with the Afghan people who risk everything to get girls an education. Also, the story of Viola Smith, the first professional jazz drummer who fought for greater recognition of women in the industry.
The EU has agreed to impose mandatory quotas on companies to ensure that women hold at least 40% of company board seats. Binding targets for gender equality on boards come 10 years after first proposals At a time when US lawmakers are increasingly restricting the rights of women and underrepresented minorities on a number of issues, the EU is moving in the opposite direction: the European Parliament recently passed a law obliging listed companies to: hold at least 40% of the non-executive director positions. That`s one-third of all director positions held by women by July 2026. The European Parliament on Tuesday adopted landmark rules to promote gender equality by increasing the number of women on the boards of large EU companies. BRUSSELS, 7. June (Reuters) – European Union negotiators agreed on Tuesday night on the first quota for women on company boards, lawmakers said, in an attempt to boost representation and improve gender equality in the bloc of 450 million people. To find out if board ratios lead companies to pay more attention to gender issues, we compared two southern European countries, Italy and Greece. In 2011, Italy introduced a quota of women on the boards of companies listed on the Italian stock exchange. This is not the case in Greece. We have created an original dataset of the text of the annual and sustainability reports for Italian and Greek listed companies for the years immediately preceding and following the adoption of the Italian quota law. Our results show that before the quota law, Italian and Greek companies had a similar trend in terms of their attention to gender equality in these reports.
After 10 years of deadlock over the proposals, EU lawmakers hailed an “important step” for gender equality. In addition to the legally binding target, companies could also be fined if they fail to recruit enough women to their non-executive governing bodies and board appointments are cancelled for non-compliance with the law. In 2021, women held 30.6% of EU board positions, but this varied considerably across Member States. The France, which has a 40% quota for women on boards, was the only EU country to cross this threshold, with 45.3% of board seats held by women, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality. Countries are similar in terms of low numbers of women in leadership positions in the private sector, as well as minimal public spending on work and family policy.