Finland is still far behind the recently agreed EU target to boost gender balance in companies, despite having made considerable progress in increasing the number of women on corporate boards over the past decade.
At the end of November, the European Parliament approved the “Women on Boards” Directive 10 years after the Commission presented its proposal.
According to the new directive, women must fill at least 40% of non-executive director posts by June 2026. To track progress, listed companies must now disclose gender representation on boards each year, while member states are expected to penalise companies failing with recruitment procedures. Excluded are small and medium-sized enterprises with less than 250 employees.
For Finland, however, just over half of the country’s listed companies fulfil the new EU gender balance criteria, a senior advisor at the Finland Chamber of Commerce, Ville Kajala told YLE in an interview.
Compared to other EU countries, however, Finland scored seventh, with 35.2% of women on average occupying company board positions. Scoring higher than Finland were France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and Germany, with France being the only country that met the EU’s criteria with a 45.3% average of women in board-level positions.
Around the turn of the millennium, only 10% of board members in Finland were women.
Changing values in society and concrete measures like the Chamber of Commerce’s mentoring programme for female executives launched in 2011 are all behind the progress.
(Pekka Vänttinen | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
