In 2002, Norway enacted a law requiring that 40 percent of all board members at state-owned and publicly listed companies be women by 2008.
Since then, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws. Now Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are considering legislative measures involving female quotas. And although Germany is also debating such a law, Deutsche Telekom, which is based in Bonn, announced last week that it would voluntarily introduce a quota aiming to fill 30 percent of upper and middle management jobs with women by the end of 2015.
Do quotas work? Would they work in the U.S.? Does the U.S. need them?
- Marit Hoel, Center for Corporate Diversity, Oslo
- Amy Dittmar, University of Michigan
- Peter Baldwin, author, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”
- Sharon Meers, former managing director at Goldman Sachs
- Linda Hirshman, author, “Get to Work”
What Norway Learned
Marit Hoel is the director of the Center for Corporate Diversity in Oslo.
In 2002, when Norway’s quota law was first introduced, the debate was heated. Supporters and opponents had equally strong arguments and predictions about what would happen if such a law was in effect.
The level of education in the boardroom rose, but there is little increase in the number of top executive women.
Opponents were concerned that faced with a quota law, international companies would leave the Oslo Stock Exchange and company boards would suffer from a loss of competence and skills.
Those who supported the law were thrilled that firms would be forced to recruit more female executives and managers who would then bring a new vitality to boardroom discussions.
The Norway Numbers
Amy Dittmar is an associate professor of finance at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Women hold only 15 percent of board seats in the U.S. Given that women make up a much larger percentage of college and professional school graduates (including M.B.A.’s), this representation seems low.
The drop in companies’ value associated with quotas has more to do with levels of experience than gender itself.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently began requiring public companies to disclose whether they consider diversity in identifying directors. Alternatively, many European countries have passed or are considering quotas.
Should the U.S. consider similar rules and if so what would be the effects? We can gain some insight into this question by examining the law change in Norway. In a recent study I did with Kenneth Ahern, also at the University of Michigan, we examined the effect of the Norwegian law on boards and firm value. We found that the women that were added to boards to comply with the law had less experience in upper management than their male counterparts and than women who were chosen before the law went into effect.
Quotas for Politics, Not Business
Peter Baldwin is a professor of history at University of California, Los Angeles, and the author, most recently, of “The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike.”
American companies have almost twice as many women at higher levels of management than is true in Europe. That is fewer than ideal, but the trend is upward and the results achieved without quotas.
American women work in a broader array of jobs and are not as confined to a pink-collar ghetto as European women.
The percentage of American women in the work force is below only Scandinavian levels, American women earn a higher ratio of men’s wages than anywhere outside of Scandinavia, and the percentage of American women who are legislators, senior officials or managers is higher than anywhere in Europe. These figures are not meant as back-patting, but to raise the question: What is the problem quotas would address?
The Scandinavians are tackling their particular problem. Although they have high female labor participation, their work forces are among the most gender-segregated ones in the developed world. Scandinavian women work in the state sector as nurses, teachers, social workers, while Scandinavian men work in the private sector.
Throw Out Old Assumptions
Sharon Meers is a co-author of “Getting to 50/50,” about working couples, and a former managing director at Goldman Sachs. She and her husband created the Partnership for Parity at Stanford Business School and the Dual-Career Initiative at Harvard University.
Quotas are one way to allocate positions of power — but they come with a lot of risk and resentment. Instead, we should put good process in the place of bad assumptions.
Employers can do a much better job holding social myths in check in the workplace.
Weeding out sex-role attitudes and assumptions is difficult. And it’s especially hard to get started when many leaders don’t think that there’s a problem, that nothing needs to change, that the low presence of women at the top is natural — the result of female preferences, family roles and the demands of the 24/7 workplace.
But research paints a different picture: 80 percent of mothers who leave the work force would prefer to stay on the job; children do at least as well when mothers work outside the home and men are fully engaged parents; divorce risks drops 50 percent when women and men more evenly share earnings and housework.
A Glass Ceiling in the House
Linda Hirshman is a retired professor of philosophy and the author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.” She is writing a book on the Gay Revolution.
Although the odds of anything like female quotas in the hormonally toxic U.S. business and political culture are small, the seemingly progressive European proposals, a sweet gesture and probably harmless, are way too conservative to be effective anyway.
Women need to negotiate a fairer redistribution in the home.
The Norwegian plan mandates assignment of board seats to females. The German plan rests on enhanced maternity leave and the like. Maternity leave plus quotas equals less experienced women perceived as lightweights in the boardroom.
The real glass ceiling is at home. Although exceptional women always make it against the odds, for most women, such offers are a siren song to tempt them to pick up the slack their go-getter male partners won’t strap on. They need external, collective solutions to the non-negotiable issues of human reproduction and household maintenance. Day care, not months of maternity leave. Publicly provided elder care, not “family leave.” In the U.S., dare I say it, national health care, not employment based health care, which usually comes from the more successful — read male — half of the team.
Six authors read favorite passages from books they would never discard. 
