Today the Financial Times (FT) launches Women at the Top, a multimedia series exploring why there are so few women at the top and how more talented females can get into boardrooms. To find out why Chinese women have an edge over their western peers and how quotas have boosted mentoring in France, as well as to enjoy videos interviews with women who’ve made it to the top, and others who are using mentors to progress, please visit www.ft.com/women.

You can take part in a live Q&A, lasting til tomorrow lunchtime (15 October 2010), with Patricia Tehan, headhunter at Lygon, an international executive search firm, and Peninah Thomson, an executive coach who directs a UK mentoring scheme that has been copied in France, Australia, South Africa, the Netherlands and Canada.

Almost 12% of board members is female

Women make up 11.7% of boards at the top 3001 European companies up from 9.7% in 2008 and 8.5% in 2006, the best progress since first BoardMonitor. Of a total 4,875 board seats, women occupy 571. As a result of quota legislation2 Norway remains at the top of the table in having 37.9% women on boards. Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, Belgium and France have more than doubled the number of women on boards; the introduction of Corporate Governance Codes together with equal access legislations currently under discussion in a few countries is having a significant impact, as well as increased shareholder and media scrutiny of board membership.

Download the presentation here
Download the press release here
BoardWomen Monitor 2010 in the media
Article in the Financial Times

For press coverage in The Netherlands, please access:

Managersonline.nl

Please take a few minutes to read Tara Patel’s (Bloomberg) article, referencing our fellow member Miriam Garnier of the Paris City Network.

The article starts as follows:

“A group of women wearing fake beards stormed the podium at Veolia Environnement’s crowded shareholders’ meeting in Paris last month, challenging Chairman Henri Proglio over the gender makeup of his overwhelmingly male board. “Is it really wise to allow women to define the strategy of a company, a task requiring intelligence, an ability to react, and coolheadedness?” asked a disguised member of the feminist advocacy group La Barbe, or “The Beard.” She taunted the French water utility for having only one woman on its 17-member board.”

The bottom line: French boardrooms have long been a male domain. A proposal requiring that at least 40 percent of directors be women could change that.

Read the full article by clicking here.

Deutsche Telekom AG announced today that it is introducing quota for women in management. It aims to have women fill 30 percent of upper and middle management positions by the end of 2015 compared with only 13 percent recently.

“Having a greater number of women at the top will quite simply enable us to operate better,” chief executive Rene Obermann was quoted as saying.

“Taking on more women in management positions is not about the enforcement of misconstrued egalitarianism. It is a matter of social fairness and a categorical necessity for our success,” Obermann said.

The company says 13 percent of its management positions were occupied by women in 2008. Deutsche Telecom is the first on Germany’s DAX index of blue-chip stocks to introduce quota.

Industrial giant Siemens is the only DAX company to have a woman on its senior board.