The German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom announced recently they would introduce a dictate that by 2015 30% of middle and upper management positions must be filled by women.
They are thus far the only DAX-listed company to consider such a move, but elsewhere in Europe gender quotas are becoming an increasingly familiar site on the corporate landscape.
Norway introduced legislation in 2002 that required 40% of all board members to be women, with Spain and the Netherlands following suit. Other countries contemplating passing similar laws include Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden.
Closer to home, Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick has said, “We need to kick start this process of gender equality”, espousing the view that quotas are a useful means of forcibly imposing greater equality between men and women in the boardrooms of the nation.
Take a look at the numbers and you can see why legislators are concerned about the lack of ladies in leadership roles. In Australia, of the top 200 companies listed on the ASX, only 8.7% of board directorships are held by women, while women account for only 13% of the bench in the Federal Court of Australia.
In the US, women hold roughly 15% of seats on company boards, while in the UK women make up only 12.2% of directors of FTSE 100 companies.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently threatened: “If we don’t see a dramatic change in the composition of company boards in the future, we will need to consider taking more serious action to ensure companies recruit from the diverse pool of talent we have in the UK.”
Women now represent more than half of university graduates, and account for more than 50% of the workforce (a landmark point passed in the US late last year) so how come how come the upper echelons of the business world remain a largely male preserve?
Consider this. The under-representation of women running companies or chairing boards may not directly reflect the misogynistic ways of the corporate patriarchy and thus can only be materially addressed by the brute force of legislation.
Rather, might the fact that women represent less than 6% of senior line management roles (US figures) be because they are hesitant to commit to the 14- hour days necessary to reach such heights?
The debate thus far about gender quotas is presupposed on assumptions about intent and desire. They are predicated on the idea that women, are willing to make, with equal magnitude to men, the personal sacrifices required to get to the top.
In the past 40 odd years it has become a given that women want to work (to some degree) and that they will crave and seek personal definition and success (not to mention financial independence) in the professional sphere.
Rewind just 20 years and there was a seeming global shoulder-padded charge towards the glass ceiling. Many women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s today have grown up watching their mothers attempt to find the promised land of Having It All and have witnessed the ensuing frustration and exhaustion that the pursuit of this illusory goal brings.
But in 2003 Lisa Belkin penned a piece for the New York Times called “The Opt-Out Revolution”, her thesis being that well-educated women were choosing not to jostle and hustle their way up the corporate ladder, thirsting for professional scalps. Rather these daughters of second-wave feminism were finding that the life they wanted to lead was one that included a much greater balance between the personal and the professional. If that meant not making partner or getting the corner office, so be it.
Belkin wrote, “Women—specifically, educated professional women—were supposed to achieve like men. Once the barriers came down, once the playing field was leveled, they were supposed to march toward the future and take rightful ownership of the universe, or at the very least, ownership of their half.”
But the reality has proved quite different: “It’s not just that the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace,” Belkin writes.
Or, as Maureen Rice a UK magazine editor put it, writing in the Daily Mail, “If women aren’t running the country or big business, it’s mainly because we just don’t want to. Any glass ceiling that’s in place these days isn’t an enemy to women, but our alibi”.
This quiet but seismic shift in attitude amongst many tertiary-educated women reflects a growing acknowledgement that women are essentially held hostage by their fertility and the very limited window of opportunity available to them to become a parent.
The lesson of the last few decades has been no matter with what warrior-like, Filofax-toting, multi-tasking mentality women tackle the challenge of combing motherhood and a career, there will come a point at which they must start to make compromises, as difficult and as frustrating as they may be.
The question is fundamentally one of timing and sacrifice. The timetables to which men and women’s reproductive lives are set differ dramatically. Quotas do not reflect the different realities men and women face. These inequalities cannot be mandated, legislated or funded away to create some artificial “level” playing field.
There will never be complete parity when it comes to the politics of gender in the workforce because at the heart of the matter is an alienable, biological inequality.
The Norwegian example demonstrates the questionable success of gender quotas.
In 2009 Oslo’s Centre for Corporate Diversity found that “so far there is little increase in the number of top executive women in quota companies”.
Or as Governor General Quentin Bryce told Kerry O’Brien in an interview with The 7.30 Report: “you can have it all, but not all at the same time”.
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