Icon: enlarge
Lack of women on Germany's boardrooms (symbolic picture)
Photo: Oliver Berg / DPA
There is a dramatic shortage of women on the boards of German companies.
Despite the long-standing discussion about the high value of female professionals for the economy, only ten percent of the top 100 companies listed on the stock exchange are women board members, as a study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows.
The share of women in the power levers of companies is increasing so slowly that at this rate it would take more than 30 years for men and women to reach parity on the executive boards.
Germany's neighbors are proving that things can be done very differently.
Among the 27 EU countries, board members here are just 24th in terms of the proportion of women. Romania, Estonia and Lithuania are ahead with almost a third of women board members, France and Denmark have a fifth, Spain and Portugal at least 16 and 15 percent , Italy to 13 percent.
Enough female executives are waiting
What is actually not lacking in Germany is the reservoir of candidates for the management of the company.
"The talent pipelines of the companies are well filled," state the study authors.
Their analysis showed that 19 percent of the employees at the board level are women, and 23 percent even lower the level.
There would therefore be enough women for the top jobs in Germany.
"Nevertheless, German companies find it difficult to become more diverse on their own initiative," the authors say.
It has long been proven by many studies how positive the effect of various management teams is for companies.
Such companies are consistently seen as more profitable, more innovative and more successful in the long term.
Companies with several women on the management team generated an average of nine percentage points higher profit margins, had 19 percent fewer legal disputes and a 14 percent lower probability of being involved in fraud cases, according to the analysis.
"Diversity makes companies economically successful. Unfortunately, this fact has not yet reached the minds of all decision-makers in Germany," says Nicole Voigt, author of BCG's diversity studies.
While a top group of companies is continuously expanding the diversity in management, others are doing nothing in this regard.
"The top 50 companies in our index have increased the proportion of women on the executive board by half since 2017, namely from 13 to 20 percent."
But the bottom 50 companies had no women on their boards in 2017, and that will still be the case in 2020.
Successes abroad intensify the debate about the quota for women
Many European countries have massively increased the proportion of women on board members through women's quotas.
That is also fueling the debate in Germany.
Family Minister Franziska Giffey (SPD) wants to enforce greater equality in management levels with other ministers and has recently targeted a women's quota for state-owned companies such as Deutsche Bahn.
Most of the male board members at Deutsche Bahn don't want to know anything about it.
From the point of view of the BCG experts, there is no shortage of levers to pave the way for more women to reach management levels.
For example, one could oblige companies to indicate quotas for women in job advertisements and thus make their position on them public.
Firms could couple diversity targets with executive compensation.
With job sharing and changes to parental allowance and spouse splitting, more incentives could be created for women to take up management positions.
Quotas for women and the right to work from home were also possible drivers.
Icon: The mirror