EU Report: Women on Boards

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, unlike other noble Lords who are speaking in this debate, I am a strong supporter of obligatory quota systems for gender equality, and certainly at the national level. They create a platform for advance that no other approach can rival. We have a lot of evidence on this. Voluntary approaches by and large do not work, no matter how ambitious they are. After more than a century of struggle for women’s rights, 86.5% of board members in the EU are still men—that is almost 90% after such a long period. That shows that we are dealing with very deeply embedded forces. Radicalism of all sorts is required on the issue, not only for reasons of social justice but because of the need to tap an unused reservoir of human capital. We owe the EU Commissioner, Viviane Reding, a debt of gratitude for putting the issue so forcefully on to the EU 2020 agenda, even if her original proposals do not look as though they will go through.

I have two questions for the Minister. First, what plans do the Government have not just to implement the recommendations of the Davies report but to go beyond it, especially to introduce some form of sanction? Without sanctioning mechanisms, we are not going to get near the targets. Secondly, does the noble Baroness agree that only those countries that have introduced enforced quota systems have made fast and substantial progress? We know the famous case of Norway, but in a whole string of other countries there has been a dramatic change in the course of even a year or two after the introduction of such legislation.