Member states to decide on 40% quota for women on company boards

EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding tweeted "success" at agreement from the College of Commissioners to back diluted proposals for 40% of company directors to be female by 2020.

The proposals are the result of a failed attempt to have the entire European Commission back a mandatory law to have the quotas for all publicly listed companies, after opposition from member states led by Britian - amongst them Malta.

Justice minister Chris Said had confirmed Malta was part of the diplomatic push spearheaded by the UK to send a joint letter to the Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso to oppose the mandatory quotas.

Said had argued that it would be "counterproductive for the EU to work towards developing legislative measures in terms of legally-binding quotas, given the very different situations and starting points in member states making it very difficult to foresee how a 'one-size-fits-all' solution can be implemented effectively across the EU."

Originally, the proposed EU law excluded publicly-listed companies with less than 250 employees or an annual turnover of €50 million from the mandatory quotas.

It would have affected companies like Bank of Valletta, in which government retains a 25% shareholding and the right to appoint the chairperson of the board of directors: BOV's nine-man board has no women, the last female director having been Marlene Mizzi, today a Labour candidate.

Rather than imposing a 40% quota on pain of penalties, the latest draft encourages companies to aim for that level of representation but leaves national governments to decide whether to enforce the rules by inflicting sanctions.

It is not clear whether Reding's watered-down legislation will win support from member governments, but it is likely to be supported in the European parliament, where MEPs have to adopt it before it can become law.

The Maltese government says it has taken the initiative to ensure that women are well represented on boards and committees in the public sector, and it has introduced tax breaks for mothers returning to the labour market.

A cursory glance at the public sector's main corporations and government-owned companies also indicates that the presence of women on boards is probably already at 40% on average.

But within the Maltese private sector, 'board-ready' women are not adequately represented.

The European Commission says that according to the EU Labour Force Survey, Malta has over 1,000 women (25%) in the private sector who are directors and CEOs or managers of small enterprises, compared to over 4,000 men who have the same roles in private business.

And yet, nearly 60% of university graduates are women, a heartening figure dampened by the fact that Malta has the lowest rate of female participation in the labour market of all the EU member states: 34% of the national workforce.

Additionally, Malta's severe gender imbalance is felt in other aspects of public life:

• across the civil service and the nine government ministries, there are only eight women in the highest, non-political administrative positions compared to 92 men (level 1 administrators), and 28 women compared to 72 men in level 2 administrative roles.
• The Central Bank's board of directors and its committees have just three women compared to 11 men on decision-making bodies.
• The Maltese courts have three women judges out of 21, but nine women magistrates out of a total of 20.
• In politics, the gender imbalance persists with (up to end-2011) just nine women elected mayors (13%) out of 68, and 98 female councillors (22%) compared to 345 male councillors. Mayors are elected if they have the highest first-count vote, within the party that gains more seats on the council.
• And in the national parliament, only six women have been elected to the House of Representatives, just 9% of the 69 MPs.