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Diversity?
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Lisa Kling/Moment RF/Getty Images
The good news for the 111th birthday of International Women's Day first: There are now female bosses in Germany!
Thanks to the new management board quota last year, 42 percent of new appointments to top positions in the leading German index were women.
As a result, the proportion of women in the Dax grew from 15.3 to 19.1 percent – a record.
The first-class students in the DAX family, each with 40 percent women in the board offices, are Continental, Fresenius Medical Care and Siemens Healthineers.
But that doesn't mean that it's suddenly sunshine everywhere.
So now for the bad news: a total of 199 of the 246 DAX board members are still men.
As of January 1, 2022, eight of the 40 companies – Brenntag, Hello Fresh, Linde, Porsche, Delivery Hero, Symrise, Sartorius and MTU – did not have a single woman on the board.
And where the law does not apply, for example in large parts of the MDAX, everything is business as usual.
According to a survey by the executive search firm Russell Reynolds, only five women were appointed to the executive board last year.
At the turn of the year, 29 of the 50 MDax companies had zero women on their executive boards.
The proportion of women at the top management level rose minimally from 11 to 11.7 percent - in an international comparison, a sad, sparkling bottom.
Few innovative innovators
The situation in the start-ups is really worrying.
Although it looks young and innovative on the outside, the same patterns work on the inside as in the ossified Deutschland AG: the buddies get their buddies onto the board.
Data from the AllBright foundation, which works to promote more diversity in management positions, now show that the newcomers on the floor "reliably pull down the proportion of women on the executive boards of the 160 listed companies every year".
In April 2021, those who were new to the stock market indices in the past five years had a female share of just 10.2 percent on the executive board.
In the companies that were founded in the past 15 years and are now listed, the proportion of women on the executive boards is 5.4 percent.
AllBright explains these numbers with the behavior of the venture capitalists, who ensure that "usually no resources are used for strategically diverse recruitment, but rather recruited largely from the existing network".
So the innovators are by no means particularly innovative.
They are worse than stock.
Why International Women's Day is important
On the supervisory boards of corporations, however, things are looking much better – for many there, a statutory women's quota of 30 percent has been in force for some time.
Figures don't lie and they say: The statutory quotas for women on the supervisory and executive boards of listed companies are working.
But where they don't work, the willingness to change develops at a snail's pace.
According to Wiebke Ankersen, head of AllBright Germany, the experience of the supervisory bodies shows that the enthusiasm for female appointments decreases noticeably "as soon as a socially acceptable level has been reached".
This makes Women's Day a good opportunity to think outside the box and to compare what has been achieved in Germany with the results in other industrialized countries.
And then to understand that women in Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, French or British top management are so much more common, so much more accepted than here.
When it begins to dawn on the gentlemen that this is not a competitive disadvantage – on the contrary!
– this is often the first step towards serious change.