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Gender quotas in the boardroom – could it happen here?

Company boardrooms, especially of large corporations have traditionally been regarded as all-male preserves – and with good reason in Ireland. Only 6% of directors in top Irish companies are women.

While there may be a number of reasons for that - it now appears that other European countries have responded to similar underrepresentation of women by imposing gender quotas in the directorships of large companies.

In 2006 Norway required that listed companies have a specified proportion of women on their board of directors. Now French parliament has taken a similar approach by passing legislation providing that within the next three years, 20% of a company's board members must be women, rising to 40% within the following six years. This applies to companies quoted on the stock exchange (CAC 40), or those with more than 500 employees, with a turnover exceeding €50 million over the previous three years. Public companies regulated by commercial law, such as industrial and state-owned companies, are also covered.

If these thresholds are not reached, the French law provides that directors will not be paid. While earlier drafts of the legislation provided that any decisions made by a board not fulfilling the quota would be invalid, this clause was withdrawn from the final version of the text. However, any nomination to a board that fails to respect the quotas is automatically invalid.

The Employment Equality Acts extend the scope of anti-discrimination legislation to self employed contractors, partners and state and local authority office holders so there already exists scope for women to challenge under representation at the highest level in some sectors (e.g. law firms and accountancy practices). In addition, the Employment Equality Acts provide that employers may lawfully take positive steps to ensure full equality in practice between men and women in their employment and to prevent or compensate for disadvantage in professional careers.

However, those provisions are a far cry from compelling companies to meet gender quotas for directorships. Irish corporate governance is very much a live topic within the Department of Enterprise and the issue of gender imbalance remains to be addressed. Whether it will be priorised remains to be seen.

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