Norway’s boards now 40% female

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on January 12, 2008  
Filed Under General

From January 1 all public companies in Norway are obliged to ensure that at least forty percent of their board directors are women. If they don’t measure up, they could be dissolved. Most firms have obeyed the law, which was passed in 2003, but a few are yet to do so.

Before the law was proposed, about seven percent of board members in Norway were female. The number has since jumped to 36 percent. That is far higher than the nine percent for big companies across Europe, eleven percent for Britain’s FTSE 100, or America’s fifteen percent for the Fortune 500. In Australia, the figure is only seven percent, according to Women on Boards.

Norwegian companies have had to recruit about one thousand women in four years. Many complain that it has been difficult to find experienced candidates. Because of this, some of the best women have collected as many as 25-35 directorships each, and are known in Norwegian business circles as the golden skirts.

One reason for the scarcity is that only fifteen percent of women occupy senior positions in Norwegian companies. It has been particularly hard for firms in the oil, technology and financial industries to find women with enough experience.

Some people worry that their relative lack of experience may keep women quiet on boards. Recent history in Norway, however, suggests otherwise. When a whistleblower at Statoil, the country’s biggest firm, alerted managers in 2003 to possible illegal payments to a consultant to secure contracts in Iran, it was Grace Reksten Skaugen and two other women directors who called an extraordinary board meeting that resulted in the resignations of the chairman and chief executive.

“Women feel more compelled than men to do their homework,” says Ms Reksten Skaugen, who was voted Norway’s chairman of the year for 2007, “and we can afford to ask the hard questions, because women are not always expected to know the answers.”


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