Top European companies boost number of women in leadership roles

Twenty-two of Europe's largest multinationals have increased the proportion of women in leadership positions faster than their share in the companies' total workforce since 2012, suggesting that they may be making progress in helping women break through the "glass ceiling" to the boardroom.

"The greatest challenge for industrial companies is to increase the number of women in the talent pipeline, in the management of operations and in executive roles," said Jean Pierre Clamadieu, chairman and chief executive of Solvay, the Belgian chemicals company.

The companies include Germany's industrial conglomerate Siemens, pharmaceuticals company Bayer, Switzerland's Nestle, the world's largest food producer by sales, and French oil group Total, which together represent a fifth of the top 20 European companies by market capitalisation.

At Siemens, women make up 24 per cent of worldwide staff numbers, down from a quarter in 2012, but the share of women in leadership positions has risen from 14 to 16 per cent.

At Nestle, the share of women in the global workforce - a third - has remained roughly static, but women in leadership have risen from 28.5 to 32.6 per cent, the highest percentage among the 22 companies.

The companies are members of the European Round Table of Industrialists, which groups together 53 chief executives and chairmen of leading European multinational companies across a wide range of sectors. On Tuesday, 32 of these will publish voluntary targets for the number of women in leadership positions, 11 more than those who adopted targets in 2012. They include Rio Tinto, SAP and Ericsson.

The targets vary between companies, as does the definition of leadership positions. At some companies, including Siemens, the proportion of jobs in the total workforce considered management positions went up between 2012 and 2015.

"It is in the interest of companies, and Europe's prosperity, to better involve the vast female talent pool," the ERT said.

Only two of the ERT's 53 members, who join on a personal basis, are women - Guler Sabanci, chairman of Turkey's Sabanci Holding, and Nancy McKinstry, chief executive of Wolters Kluwer - demonstrating the scale of the challenge that remains.

Since Ms McKinstry joined the Dutch information services company in 2003, the number of women in senior positions there has risen from 20 per cent to 50 per cent. It is the only listed company in the Netherlands that already meets the government's aim for boards to consist of 30 per cent women by 2016.

Many companies in Europe are scrambling to meet government-imposed quotas for the proportion of women on their boards. Norway was the first, in 2003, to impose a legal duty on companies to increase this number - in its case, to 40 per cent. Since then, other countries, including France, Spain, the Netherlands and, most recently Germany, have followed suit.

In the UK, the government has a target - rather than a quota - of 25 per cent of women on FTSE 100 boards, and last month these boards comprised 24 per cent women, up from 13 per cent in 2010. Critics point out that the statistics hide the fact that the great majority of new female directors are in non-executive roles, and often selected from a relatively small band of part-time women who hold multiple, non-executive director positions at the same time.

In the US, women held 17 per cent of the board seats of Fortune 500 companies at the beginning of 2014, according to Forbes.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation