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March 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Mrs Berdal’s caution may come as a shock to those who praise Norway’s business
community as a model of how to propel more women into the boardroom. Across
Europe only 13.7 per cent of board members from large firms are women, while
in Italy the figure falls to a mere 6.1 per cent. In Britain 15.6 per cent
of FTSE 100 board directorships are now held by women.
Mrs Berdal’s comments come in the wake of this month’s launch by Viviane
Reding, the EU justice commissioner, of a three-month consultation on how to
redress the gender imbalance in the boardroom. Member states, business
organisations and firms are being canvassed for their views as “stakeholders”,
and asked what sanctions could be used against companies which fail to meet
gender targets.
However, while critics say quota schemes are both ineffective and patronising
to women, the tone of the consultation paper suggests Ms Reding has already
made her mind up on the matter.
Nowhere does the paper ask whether quotas are a good idea in principle;
instead it poses questions such as: “Which objectives (eg 20 per cent,
30 per cent, 40 per cent, 60 per cent) should be defined for the share of
the under-represented sex on company boards?”
Ms Reding, a feisty ex-journalist from Luxembourg, is not afraid to lecture
other European nations on the importance of progressive polices. In 2010,
she sparked a furious row with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, when
she likened his plans to deport Roma immigrants to the policies of the
Holocaust. “Personally, I am not a great fan of quotas, but I like the
results they bring,” she told The Sunday Telegraph.
Supporters of the compulsory targets say that it would break the “Old
Boy’s Network” cycle and rapidly redress an imbalance that would
otherwise take decades to rectify. Opponents of quotas claim that it simply
leads to women being put on boards to make up numbers, and that the
Norwegian experience bears this out.
“Quotas are a tool and they can be very effective,” Ms Reding
insisted. “It’s clear that they can be a solution when the top
positions in companies are blocked for women. There is nothing demeaning
about bringing diversity to Europe’s companies.”
She said that Finland currently led the way in the EU, with 27 per cent female
membership of board rooms, but that otherwise the picture overall was still “bleak”,
with only one in seven female board members in Europe’s top firms, and only
one in 30 acting as boardroom chairs.
But the idea of EU interference on the composition of boards has caused
consternation in the UK. An annual study of boardroom gender by the
Cranfield School of Management, published last week (MARCH 13), said there
had already been a “significant move in the right direction” since
publication of a report by Lord Davies a year ago, calling for companies to
voluntarily increase the number of women on their boards.
“Quotas are not only needless but potentially damaging and actually
undermine the very equality the pro-quota lobby seeks,” said Helena
Morrissey, CEO of Newton Investment Management and founder of the 30 Per
Cent Club – an organisation aiming to get more women onto boards.
“Investors don’t want quotas; board directors need to be there on merit
and there’s evidence that shareholder value can be destroyed if quotas are
imposed,” she wrote in a recent article.
Critics also point out that while Norway has 40 per cent female non-executive
directors, only two per cent of its chief executive officers – who wield the
real power – are women.
But it will come as no surprise that socially progressive Norway has been
leading the way. “Norway doesn’t just live off oil; it also lives off
equality,” said Audun Lysbakken, who until earlier this month was the
head of Norway’s Ministry for Children, Equality and Social Inclusion. “These
increase our productivity because more people are active in all fields of
working life.”
The Scandinavian nation tops European statistics on participation of women in
the workforce, and was also the world’s first to introduce paternity leave.
Fathers are currently entitled to 10 weeks parental leave – as opposed to
just two in Britain – and couples can opt for either 46 weeks leave on full
pay, or 56 weeks on 80 per cent pay.
But even so, men and women were initially reluctant to the quota system,
arguing that it demeaned women and would bring in an influx of inexperienced
people who might not have otherwise got the job.
It has also created the phenomenon of the so-called “golden skirts,”
a group of around 70 women who hold multiple directorships, allegedly
because there is not enough female business talent to go around. But Mrs
Berdal said the term “golden skirt” was itself sexist, pointing
out that male colleagues with similar roles were referred to as “well-known
businessmen”, not “golden trousers”.
Mrs Berdal said she was broadly supportive of the quota system, as a necessary
step – even though she disliked the principle of interference in boards. She
also denied that it had adversely affected the profitability of Norwegian
companies.
“If women are just there as ‘tokens’, then the nomination committee is
doing a really bad job. I don’t know any woman who is there just to make up
the numbers; they are all highly qualified and professional,” she said.
“There was obviously resistance at the beginning, but now that it has been
there for a few years it has weakened.
“My general experience is that it is working fine, and that boards are not
weakened by the system: on the contrary, in fact.
But other business experts have expressed scepticism that the EU could impose
uniform restrictions on such diverse national working cultures.
Kenneth Ahern, a professor of finance from the University of Michigan, doubted
whether Britain was ready to make the necessary financial sacrifice to push
women onto boards. His own research on Norway, published last year, showed
that “the quota led to younger and less experienced boards, and
deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards.”
He told The Sunday Telegraph: “In Norway, they knew that the value
of their companies would drop, but society there cared more about equality
than finance. It was a conscious decision.
“For the EU to make such an important moral choice, across such a variety
of countries, is a very big ask indeed. I could see there being real
resistance to obligatory quotas from countries such as Germany and the UK,
which prize the financial output extremely highly.”
Mrs Berdal, who was a widely-travelled international lawyer before dedicating
herself full time to board work, agreed that it could be hard to impose
quotas in Britain.
“I think the British culture – both in society in general, and in
business – is a bit more conservative, and still a bit more male dominated
than in Scandinavia.
“In the boardroom, if you have only men, they tend to know each other
from school, university or the golf club, and decisions are often made
outside of the boardroom so you don’t have full control and transparency.
Maybe in the UK you’ll have to twist some more arms.”
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