#GAReads | Will the Netherlands' gender quota experiment work?
“Will the Netherlands' gender quota experiment work?”:
Although women in the Netherlands have strong equality rights in law, many believe their representation in public life and at the top of business is lagging. The number of female MPs has fallen since 2010. In 2019, women made up only 12 per cent of those on Dutch management boards and 20 per cent on supervisory boards. By contrast, the AllBright Foundation reports that women have 29 per cent of the top jobs in the United States, 25 per cent in Sweden, 25 per cent in Britain and 22 per cent in France.
A Dutch government report last month, entitled ‘no law, no progress’, made a stark assessment of the situation. A voluntary target for companies to have 30 per cent female representation at board level from 2013 to 2020, it argued, simply hadn’t worked.
‘You would have hoped that more businesses would have taken this up themselves, but this is not the case,’ Caroline Princen, chair of the monitoring committee, said at the time. ‘This really will not just happen by itself.’