The Norway model for the UK? - Building Gender Balanced Business

• London Business School professor Lynda Gratton calls for a Norwegian style quota for increasing the number of women on UK boards
• Currently the pace of change is glacial, resulting in a great waste of talent
• Norway has proved that it can be done quickly, Spain is adopting its own quota legislation, but the UK remains behind
• Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Leader of the House of Commons, says that the new Equality Bill will allow companies to “put their house in order”, enabling them to favour women candidates in cases where there are two equal applicants of both sexes
• Peninah Thomson, executive coach at Praesta Partners challenges the idea that the Norway model would work in the UK but she does a deal with journalist Peter Day: if there is insufficient progress in two years, she will join the advocates of quota legislation

Professor Gratton felt that women should be angrier about this issue. “Bring back Germaine Greer! We really should start howling”, she added.

In the discussion, all of the participants agreed that a more “natural” process of change was slow. Elin Hurvenes, founder of the Professional Boards Forum (established in 2003 in Norway to provide a forum whereby companies could meet and network with potential female candidates for their boards) said that she had had reservations about the quota legislation in Norway at the beginning but that she finally realised that a more natural pace would mean waiting too long – about 100 years in fact!

Then she supported the proposal wholeheartedly and said that in general businesses had taken the change “in their stride”. She referred to a comment made by one property entrepreneur at the time who had said that he would lose 40% of his weakest men and hire 40% of the strongest female candidates and that this would obviously improve the quality of his board. She said she thought he was right. In the end, in spite of fears, it did not prove difficult to find the 750 or so women of the right calibre to fill the seats on the board in Norway, she said.

Ole Jacob Sunde, chairman of the Oslo-based internet media company Schibsted supported the quota but warned that the law was also slightly inflexible, in that it compelled companies to hire 40% women and 40% men. This meant that for Schibsted they have a board of three men and three women, a proportion they would not able to alter if they wished to in the future, regardless of the best available mix of talent.

Ana Maria Llopis, a prominent Spanish businesswoman, said that the socialist government under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero had been instrumental in bringing forth the current law to compel companies to have a higher representation on their boards (though the process is slower than in Norway, taking about 10 years). She said she believes strongly in the quota because otherwise the pace of change would be too slow.

Elin Hurvenes, founder of the Professional Boards Forum said that she had had reservations about the quota legislation in Norway at the beginning but that she finally realised that a more natural pace would mean waiting too long – about 100 years in fact!

Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, felt that change was slow in the UK because companies simply had proved unable or unwilling to make their workplaces more flexible and family-friendly.

Harriet Harman, Minister for Women and Leader of the House of Commons, said that the forthcoming Equality Bill, which is designed to simplify and modernise discrimination law, will enable companies to choose a woman candidate over a man when both are equal in terms of competence and suitability for the job. She said it would allow companies in the UK to “put their house in order”. But, for now, she dismissed the need for quota legislation.

Peninah Thomson, executive coach at Praesta Partners, felt that quotas would not work, that they went “against the grain of British culture”. Targets encouraged a politically correct, box-ticking behaviour, she said, but did not tend to work in the UK. She feared a quota of this kind could drive opposition underground, where it is more dangerous, and alienate men. Peter Day challenged her, saying that “she should be howling for change” and that recent history had shown that the pace was too slow any other way.

Thomson agreed to do a deal. If in two years time, there is not a marked increase in the ratio of women to men on the FTSE boards, she would join Day and others in arguing strongly for quota legislation.