Many corporations in Germany have neglected to promote women in their own ranks for decades. Now personnel service providers should fill the gaps for them and poach candidates from competitors all over the world. The only problem is that even the headhunters themselves lack diversity. The vast majority of them are German, male – and disproportionately noble.
This emerges from the latest report from the non-profit Allbright Foundation. According to this, 63 percent of the women who are now on the executive boards of the 160 companies listed in the Dax, MDax or SDax have not pursued a career in their own company, but were recruited from outside. In the case of men, on the other hand, the proportion of board members recruited was only 44 percent.
“Companies are trying to make up for years of deficits in promoting women by robbing others,” says Allbright Foundation executive director Wiebke Ankersen. “They urgently need to get down to drilling the thicker board and systematically developing women in their own ranks.”
In September 2022, the Allbright Foundation counted a total of 599 men and 99 women on the boards of the Dax, MDax and SDax companies. This corresponds to a proportion of women of 14.2 percent. Just 0.8 percentage points more than in the previous year. This slight increase was solely due to the 40 large Dax companies, whose proportion of women on the board increased to 20 percent. The two smaller stock exchange segments did not get past eleven or ten percent.
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In the past six months, there has been a little more movement on the executive floor. Among the new appointments were almost as many women as men, so that the proportion of women in the 160 larger publicly traded companies rose to 17.1 percent as of March 1 of this year.
Source: Infographic WORLD
“External women are now also increasingly being sought for the level below the board of directors in order to fill up our own pool with female executives,” says the foundation’s current report. The proportion of women among the new board members recruited by personnel consultancies has risen from 14 to 46 percent within four years. 34.1 percent of the positions on the supervisory board of the 160 listed companies are now occupied by women.
The foundation closely examined the rankings of the world‘s five largest personnel consultancies. With Egon Zehnder, Heidrick & Struggles, Korn Ferry, Russell Reynolds Associates and Spencer Stuart, they not only bear the names of their male founders. To this day, they are still very male-dominated and led by men, especially in their German offshoots. After all, according to the Allbright Foundation, two competitors have brought women into their German management: the German HR consultancy Kienbaum and the British Odger Berndtson.
Source: Infographic WORLD
“In order to be able to credibly advise companies on a balanced composition of the top management teams, the personnel consultancies have to be one step ahead of their clients,” demands Ankersen. So far, however, they have hardly been that when it comes to diversity.
The consultant teams at the five international headhunters in Germany are 90 percent German and 63 percent male. Two thirds of them have studied economics, 40 percent have a doctorate and at least eight percent have an aristocratic title. For comparison: in the total population, the proportion of nobles is only about 0.1 percent.
At least the proportion of women is also changing among consultants. In the past year in Germany, more than 70 percent of the new hires in the “executive search”, the area in which executives are poached away from companies, were women at the five large personnel consultancies. “Because they know that they need the female networks to be able to serve their customers’ demand for female top executives,” says Ankersen.
So far, the corporations have been increasingly fishing abroad, where there are already more women at the top levels than in German companies. In the past five years, the headhunters have found every second female board member for a listed company in a foreign company. In the case of male recruits, this proportion was only one third.
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It is interesting to take a look at who is considered “suitable for the board” and who is not. According to the analysis by the Allbright Foundation, entire groups of people are severely underrepresented among those recruited.
Among the people that the leading headhunters have placed with the boards of Dax, MDax and SDax companies since March 2018, only one percent are humanities scholars and two percent are Germans with foreign roots.
Men and women with East German socialization were also in the absolute minority at two percent, as were people who were socialized outside of Europe and North America (3 percent). In terms of age, the group of newly recruited board members was also not very diverse. The vast majority were between 45 and 60 years old. Only ten percent were younger, one percent older.
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