European diversity
July 29th, 2008
One fact from a column by Richard Milne in yesterday’s Financial Times really shocked me:
The situation [on female directors] is even worse in Germany, which shamefully only has one female management board member from the 200 or so executives in Dax-30 companies, Bettina von Oesterreich at Hypo Real Estate.
Milne’s starting point for his column was the recent comment by Siemens’ CEO Peter Lõscher that his own group was “too German, too white and too male”. Germany has a female chancellor, which seems to me (and I imagine most Germans) unremarkable at this point. It seems extraordinary that large corporations haven’t moved with the times. What a neglect of half the country’s talent.
Milne points out the a survey of the UK’s FTSE-100 companies in 2006 found only 11 per cent of directors were female. That’s bad, but it looks wonderful compared to Germany.