Too many suits: And not nearly enough skirts in the boardrooms

Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition of The Economist

“PERHAPS WE WOMEN should just keep out of this male circus,” said one of the participants in a forum on “German Female Executives” run by Odgers Berndtson, a firm of headhunters. Gabriele Stahl, a partner in the firm’s Frankfurt office, recalls this comment because it seems to sum up the way many female managers feel about getting to the top of the corporate tree.

If they ever do. A study by Elke Holst and Julia Schimeta by the German Institute of Economic Research in Berlin found that in 2010 women held only 3.2% of all executive board seats in Germany’s 200 biggest non-financial firms. In the largest companies their share was even smaller. Financial institutions and insurance companies, where at least half of all employees are female, did no better than the rest, and state-owned companies were only slightly ahead. On the supervisory boards, the other component of Germany’s two-tier board structure, women are slightly better represented because some of the seats are reserved for employees, but last year they still made up only 11% of the total—and one-third of these boards had none at all. That list includes household names like Porsche, E.ON and Robert Bosch. The glass ceiling, like everything else in Germany, is pretty solid. (Article excerpt)

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