Quotas are always controversial. So Deutsche Telekom’s announcement on Monday that it is introducing a target to have 30 per cent of its top and middle management drawn from women by 2015 is likely to provoke a big debate.
But, quota or not, the German telecom group’s move makes far more sense than competing quotas in countries such as Norway.
That is because it focuses on executives, not non-executives. To recap, Norway has led the way with imposing a 40 per cent quota of female non-executive directors on its biggest companies.
The law has superficially been a success. But there are concerns about how it works from the lack of candidates to replicating a gentleman’s clubbiness among female directors. Studies also suggest there may be a correlation between having female non-execs and performance but no causality.
But, having been to Norway last year to look into it, I think the real problem is that it targets the wrong problem. Having a part-time job on a supervisory board is one thing but far more important for women’s place in business is to see plenty of female executives. And not only in the “non-operational” posts such as human resources and law.
Some companies have understood this: Storebrand, the Norwegian insurer, already has 39 per cent females among its top executives. When I saw Idar Kreutzer, its chief executive, over a typically Scandinavian lunch of open sandwiches, his argument was almost a selfish one: here is a huge talent pool we were ignoring.
So he asked headhunters to propose one woman and one man for every senior job at the company. He still chose the best but the idea was to provoke the headhunters into finding more suitable candidates.
Promoting female executives also would help undercut one of the complaints over female non-execs: they lack experience. Of course, lacking experience is close to a chicken-and-egg question (how do you have board experience if you’ve never been on one?)
So Deutsche Telekom’s move is probably a smart one, not least in terms of image. But for all the company’s talk of “a glass ceiling” it wants to break it could have already taken some pretty simple steps to shatter it: Deutsche Telekom’s seven-person management board does not have a single woman on it.
Related reading:
Top 50 women in world business FT interactive graphic
