Photo Gallery Their Place at the Table
For years, German companies put little thought into appointing women to seats on their executive and management boards. Another obstacle was the fact that companies usually looked to recruit from people already on other company boards, who were almost always men.
In November, the European Commission approved a directive championed by European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding stipulating that, by 2020, 40 percent of the seats on the non-executive boards of large, publicly traded companies should be held by women. With the directive and its serious sanctions now in place, German companies are frantically searching for qualified candidates.
Brigitte Lammers, a corporate headhunter with the firm Egon Zehnder International, prefers to conduct her searches one level lower on the management hierarchy. Women who head a company's legal or compliance department, she says, are just as qualified as those who are partners in a management consultancy, as are women working as lawyers in the fields of regulatory or financial law.
German law stipulates that publicly traded companies have executive and supervisory boards. The seats on the latter must be evenly divided between members representing investors and employees, respectively. Among companies listed on the DAX-30 index alone, 71 board seat mandates on the investor side of the table will expire this year, which amounts to nearly a third of the total board seats allotted to stockholders.
German engineering giant Siemens will elect a new supervisory board in late January. On the investor side, it looks very probable that Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller, 53, a current board member who is also CEO of the engineering firm Trumpf, will be joined by another woman: Güler Sabanci, 57, the Turkish CEO and managing director of Sabanci Holding.
Meanwhile, Ann-Kristin Achleitner, 46, director of the Center for Entrepreneurial and Financial Studies at Munich Technical University, was nominated to the supervisory board of the German insurance giant Munich Re in early January. This would make Achleitner the fifth woman on the 20-member board. Achleitner is already a member of the supervisory boards of retailer Metro AG, energy provider GDF Suez and the Linde Group, a major gas and engineering company.
Ulrike Hinrichs is one woman who has brought a new way of thinking to her position as head of the German Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVK). She has taken a fairly unconventional approach, preferring to promote female colleagues to be department heads and putting less value on the traditional status symbols of her male counterparts.
In fact, a study conducted by the executive headhunting firm Egon Zehnder International finds that there has been a sharp increase in the number of women on executive boards in Germany in the last two years.
