By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is often quoted as having said, “I don’t like quotas, but I like what they do.”
Across Europe, the prospect of introducing board quotas has produced heated debate. Following Norway’s 2004 law requiring the boards of publicly traded companies to be 40 percent women, several other countries — France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and others — have introduced similar measures, although Norway’s laws remain the strictest. When I met Arni Hole, Director General of Norway’s Royal Ministry of Children, Equality, and Social Inclusion and the architect of the quota law, a few years ago, she insisted that Norway’s program is the most comprehensive in that it is binding. A company that doesn’t comply is delisted.
At the same time, some countries have resisted implementing any flavor of quotas — the UK for example. It’s also difficult to imagine any kind of boardroom gender quota legislation taking place in the United States. Quota detractors say that affirmative action forces companies to hire less qualified candidates. Proponents say that quotas ensure qualified applicants who might normally be ignored don’t get overlooked.
In fact, Stanford University research suggests that gender quotas may actually boost the percentage of high performing women willing to apply for a position. The result is that there’s no marked decrease in quality in the person who gets hired. That is — when companies signal that they want to hire more women, more high performing women apply for jobs, and more high performing women get jobs — without companies decreasing their performance expectations.