Abstract
In our neoliberally minded era, it is unpopular to expect state policies to interfere with the workings of the economy. Yet this is exactly what the gender quota legislation, introduced in Norway in 2003, set out to do. The law required public limited companies to include at least 40 percent of each gender in their corporate boards by 2008. While a number of quotas for political representation had existed in Scandinavian countries and elsewhere, the Norwegian gender quota of 2003 was the first legislation that targeted private companies. As such, it was extremely successful. In Norway, women’s representation on corporate boards increased from less than 10 percent in 2002 to the required 40 percent in the span of six years. In contrast, women’s participation on corporate boards in Denmark, where no such regulation was passed, barely changed in the same period. The success of the implementation notwithstanding, gender quotas raise a number of questions: Why are they necessary at all? What is the political context where their introduction and acceptance is most likely? How can the state’s intervention into private property relations be justified? And possibly most important for policy makers, are quotas good investments? Specifically, is there a causal relationship between company performance and the proportion of women on corporate boards? These are some of the questions the recent volume in the Comparative Social Research series, Firms, Boards and Gender Quotas: Comparative Perspectives, addresses.
Reading the book, we learn a great deal about gender quotas in and outside of Norway. The first substantive article assesses the macro-sociological conditions that favor vertical desegregation. The authors, Andrea Schafer, Ingrid Tucci, and Karin Gottschall, argue that women have a better chance of making it into leadership positions in countries that have a large service sector and strong trade unions. In addition, they show that in some countries vertical desegregation at the top may go hand in hand with the persistent segregation of women into low-wage employment at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Against this backdrop, the chapters in part 3 of the volume analyze the Norwegian gender quotas and their place in European gender equality legislation.
Paradoxically, the quota legislation in Norway was passed by a liberal-conservative government, while the Swedish social-democratic government did not even present such a quota bill to the parliament. These two countries are usually considered similar in their approach to gender equality, and socialist governments have been shown to favor gender equality legislation. What then explains this surprising difference? Author Vibeke Heidenreich shows, in chapter 5, that while there are similarities between Norway and Sweden in terms of their system of equality legislation and welfare state provisions, there are important differences between them as well with respect to what the author calls “gender culture” and state-business relations. Specifically, in Norway’s democratic capitalism women make claims on the state as women, as citizens who are equal to but different from men—an ideology that, the author argues, serves as an efficient political tool to fight for gender equality. On a theoretical level, the chapter nuances known welfare typologies and suggests the importance of state–business relations in shaping the possibility of gender equality legislation.
The Norwegian experience soon became widely known and policy dispersion has begun. While no other country has implemented a similarly strict quota regulation, the dispersion process is important both theoretically and practically. Mari Teigen shows that the quota first spread to countries within the region (Finland and Iceland) and only afterwards to other countries in Western Europe and beyond. She argues that Norway was seen as economically prosperous and as a leader in the realm of gender equality regulations, thus countries adopted the quota legislation because they wanted to “follow the leader.” In addition, Teigen emphasizes the importance of expert groups and their exchange in policy dispersion, as well as the national political context, which also played a role.
In yet another carefully researched chapter, Dale-Olsen, Schone, and Verner show that while there is a positive correlation between the level of productivity and the percentage of women board members in large Norwegian companies, this is not necessarily a causal relationship.
This volume is one of the first to evaluate not only the efficiency of the Norwegian quota legislation but also the political context that gave rise to its introduction, as well as the discourses used and the arguments dismissed in the policy-making process. It is thus useful reading both for researchers and policy makers who are interested in the possibilities of and obstacles to gender equality legislation.