Germany’s government is rolling out a new standard that will require companies listed on the stock market to have a certain number of women on their boards. Companies with three board members must have one of them be a woman. And companies in which the federal government has a stake will require 30% of executive boards to be female.
The rule was agreed upon on Friday by Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. It’s similar to a system the country established in 2015 that called on companies to voluntarily increase boardroom diversity. But progressives argued, that because the system was voluntary it failed to achieve gender equality.
