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Volume 1, Number 5: October 2018 | Op-Ed
“Congratulations, you got the job“. Maybe even there’s another applicant who would fit better for that job application. How is that possible? Women’s quota introduced to Germany in 2015 determines a proportion of women in leading positions of 30 percent. Under the law, some 100 of Germany’s best-known companies must give the fixed percent of their supervisory board seats to women. It only applies for firms which have over 2000 employees. After passing the quota, the share of women as supervisory board members increased from 19 to over 32 percent in Germany. At first sight, this quota sounds like the perfect policy intervention to achieve a higher diversity of women working in leading positions and as the main goal: to reach gender equality. But in my opinion this law also leads to a lot of problems.
At first the quota discriminates against the individual men who wants to run against a woman for a seat. The concerned firms need to replace male by female workers to reach its quota, even though the companies aren’t able to find a female employee with the same qualifications as the former male member of the board. In my mind, it may occur a danger of male discrimination. Carrying on this discrimination, this quota is against the principle of equal opportunity for all. During an application process female applicants have benefits only because companies find themselves constrained to fulfill their duty of this women’s quota. In conclusion, women would be chosen because of their gender and not for their abilities or performances.
Furthermore due to this proportion of women in boardrooms, female employees have problems to gain as much respect as male employees because they are sometimes just seen as “taken” because of quota regulation. There may be the possibility that these women are treated with less respect and power.
Germany is a country with a high level of bureaucracy. As a German you have the feeling that for every activity and situation you need to note thousand rules and guidelines to prevent fines. In Germany, anti-discrimination laws are likely to complicate the whole process of searching for qualified staff. The women’s quota as a further law reinforce this problem and will burden companies even more.
At least there’s also the possibility that some working areas are simply less probable to be in the women’s field of interest than in the field of a man. For example my own experience shows that males are mostly more interested in the engineering industry and mainly in the automotive sector. So as a consequence of their greater level of interest, they have higher incentives to put much more effort to achieve a leading position in that industry than female workers would do. So the smaller share of women in the boardrooms if these industries is not only a result of discrimination of female managers but merely an outcome of the already smaller share of females in the pool of applicants.
A better choice to guarantee more gender equality is the relative quota regulation. For the case that there’s one male and one female applicant who are equally according to their qualifications, then the employer is forced to favour the female candidate. This system is applied in the German public sector since 2001 and also includes the applications of equal opportunities representatives. But this law holds only for federal administration and court, not for the private economy. In my opinion the discrimination against male applicants, created by the absolute female quota in 2015, can be prevented through the better option of the relative proportion of women. Then without any doubt it is essential for the development of a country to have gender equality, especially in the boardroom.
Reference
Reuters (06/03/2015). Mehr Frauen in Führungsetagen – Bundestag beschließt Quote. https://de.reuters.com/article/deutschland-frauenquote-bundestag-idDEKBN0M20XI20150306
I really enjoyed reading your article. You brought the statement straight to the point and I don’t really have any critics on your article. Beside that I would have liked to hear a bit more issues that arise from the policy and how this makes the life of women harder to be accepted in the working society. Furthermore you could have used a bit more references to get different views on this critical topic.