By Alexander Sturm, dpa
Frankfurt (dpa) – The proportion of women in top management at Germany’s largest stock exchange companies has reached a record high.
For the first time, more than a quarter (25.7%) of the board members in the top 40 DAX companies are female, according to an analysis by the organization Women in Supervisory Boards (Fidar), which was provided to dpa.
This is somewhat higher than in a previous study in January (23.5%) and a record since Fidar started publishing its index in 2011.
More women are also joining supervisory boards, with the DAX quota at 39.7%, just over one percentage point more than in January.
Germany has a dual board structure at major companies, with the board of directors supervising the company and the supervisory board supervising the board of directors.
“We see with the DAX 40 boards what binding regulations for equal participation can achieve,” said Fidar’s founding president Monika Schulz-Strelow. She added that over the past 10 years, the DAX companies have more than tripled the proportion of women on their boards, “and this despite all the expressed doubts that there are not enough qualified women to fill the required positions.”
Since June alone, seven women have been appointed to the boards of DAX companies, the study reported. Moreover, there are now three women at the top for the first time: Belén Garijo, chief executive of Merck, Bettina Orlopp, who has been leading Commerzbank since October, and Karin Radström, at the top of Daimler Truck since October.
Far from gender parity
For the study, which had a cut-off date of December 1, the boards of the 160 companies from the DAX, MDAX, and SDAX stock indices, as well as 18 other listed and co-determined companies, were examined.
On average, across all the companies surveyed, Fidar stated that a record one-fifth (20.3%) of board members were female, slightly more than in January (18.9%).
But when it came to the supervisory boards across all companies, the proportion of women increased only marginally to 37.2%. Schulz-Strelow criticized that gender parity is still far away.
In the DAX, the highest proportion of women on the board was at the defence company Rheinmetall, followed by Commerzbank and the medical technology provider Siemens Healthineers. At the bottom were the construction materials company Heidelberg Materials, Volkswagen, and Porsche, which was in last place.
Fidar: Regulations work – still room for improvement
To bring more women into top management, new rules from the German government have been introduced. Since 2016, a quota of 30% women has applied for the replacement of supervisory boards in listed and co-determined companies. Since the summer of 2022, large companies with boards having more than three members must also have at least one woman on the executive committee.
Fidar believes these rules are effective. Among the current 100 companies subject to the supervisory board quota, the proportion of women is noticeably higher in both supervisory boards and boards of directors, with just over 38% and nearly 24%, respectively, compared to the 78 companies not subject to the quota. This shows that voluntary commitments lead to hardly any improvement.
