Women in Leading Positions

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, language: English, abstract: A study from the European Union proves that there is no gender balance amongst board members in the largest publicly listed companies. Only Norway shows nearly a gender balance with 42 % of women in such leading positions. This figure is the result of a legal quota that was introduced by the Norway Government. In Germany 15 % of companies' board members are female. With this portion Germany is on the average of the European Union. In the 30 DAX-companies the portion is still less. Only 4 out of 184 board members in the 30- DAX-companies are female. And this is a recently development. The first woman was Mrs. Kux in the board of the Siemens-group just in 2008. Three further women became boardmembers in the DAX-companies E.ON, SAP and Siemens in 2009. Although in Germany more girls than boys have a school-leaving examination that qualifies for university entrance and female alumni achieve better results in study than their male colleagues the number of women in high positions is still too little. So a shortage of qualified women cannot be the reason for these facts.