Glass ceiling still firmly in place in listed Dutch companies

Despite all the covenants and promises around gender equality, the glass ceiling is still firmly in place at the Netherlands' largest and medium-sized listed companies. Of the 50 AEX and Midkap companies, 47 have male CEOs, NU.nl reports.

One company has a man and a woman in the top position. Two companies - PostNL and Wolters Kluwer - have women as their CEOs.

“Ideally, there would be more female CEOs,” a spokesperson for the employers association VNO-NCW said to the newspaper. “These kinds of developments are slow, and it is clear that we are not there yet. There must be more.”

The Netherlands has a “grow-in” quota for supervisory boards - if a Commissioner leaves, a woman must succeed them until at least a third of the supervisory board is made up of women. But for the boards of directors - the day-to-day management that includes the CEO - there are only “softer agreements,” a spokesperson for the Social and Economic Council (SER) said to NU.nl. “This means that companies must set targets for the number of women in high functions. They must also develop policies to achieve those goals.”

Some believe that the quota for supervisory boards will lead to more women on the board of directors. But Chantal Remery of Utrecht University, who researched such quotas, doubts it. In Norway, for example, the supervisory board quota had no effect on the number of female directors. A quota for the board of directors “would be good, but there is no support for it,” she said to the newspaper.