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EQUALITY

Danish government changes stance on EU business equality quota

Denmark’s government now supports an EU directive aimed at boosting the number of women in senior business roles, in a reversal of its earlier stance.

a boardroom
Denmark now supports an EU directive aiming to put more women in company boardrooms. Photo by Nastuh Abootalebi on Unsplash

The government was previously against an EU directive which calls for at least 40 percent of company boards to be women. There must also be 40 percent men on company boards. The directive applies to companies with more than 250 people on their payrolls.

But that has now changed with the current government reversing its previous position as well as that of several Danish governments which preceded it, newspaper Jyllands-Posten reports.

“The argument against this was that we believed we could easily promote progress ourselves [without the directive, ed.]. So an EU law was not necessary. But the status is that nothing has really happened,” minister for equality Trine Bramsen told the newspaper.

“We don’t think it’s going fast enough. That’s why we now wish to join the EU position on this area,” she said.

The EU directive states that companies should select board members based on set and neutral criteria, according to Jyllands-Posten’s report. That means that, should two candidates be equally qualified, the one from the underrepresented sex should be preferred for the position.

Data from Bramsen’s ministry show that the proportion of women on the boards of 190 of the largest stock market companies was 26 percent in 2021. That is an increase from 20 percent in 2017. But that increase is not sufficient, the minister said.

Governments in Germany and the Netherlands both also recently dropped opposition to the directive, according to Jyllands-Posten.

The Danish government will soon present a bill proposal setting down new equality criteria for Danish company boards, Bramsen also said.

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EQUALITY

IN NUMBERS: How gender equal is Denmark really?

For International Women's Day, we decided to break down the statistics over gender equality in Denmark.

IN NUMBERS: How gender equal is Denmark really?

On the face of it, Denmark is one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, ranking third in the European Institute for Gender Equality’s 2023 ranking, just behind Sweden and The Netherlands.

Denmark was ahead of The Netherlands in women’s equality in the workplace and in income equality. The country also did well when it comes to women in positions of power. It was one of only five EU countries with a female prime minister, one of five where over 40 percent of MPs are women, and has the 10th highest proportion of female MEPs in the EU. 

The European Institute for Gender Equality’s 2023 gender equality ranking.

It is generally easier for women Denmark to return to the workforce after having a child, as the generous parental leave system — with each parent granted 24 weeks each of leave following the birth of a child — encourages men to be more involved, by earmarking 11 weeks of leave for each parent.

The country has heavily subsidised daycare which is available from the time a child is 26 months old. This costs about 3,800 kroner a month in a big city like Copenhagen. 

Women also perform very well in education, overtaking men in the number studying a long course at university in 2017, since when their lead has steadily increased with 249,610 women completing a “long higher education” compared with 221,243 men. About 376,640 women have completed some form of higher education, well above the 270,003 men who had a degree. 

Where Denmark falls behind

But this hides some less flattering statistics.

Even though women are more likely to be educated to a higher level than men, this is not reflected in their earnings. The most recent comparison of the gender pay gap in different EU countries found that women in Denmark earned 13.9 percent less than men. 

That is a a bigger pay gap than the EU average of 12.7 percent, and the 9th worst score, below countries like Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Italy, even if was better than Norway (14.4 percent) and Germany (17.7 percent). This also leads to a so-called ‘pensions’ gap of 17 percent, with men’s pensions far outweighing women’s. 

The pay gap in Denmark is often put down to women being overrepresented in less well-paying caring professions such as nursing or teaching, but a study by Copenhagen Business School in 2022 found that women are also paid on average 7 percent less than men for doing the exact same job.

While this may be disappointing, the study found the wage gap for the same job was lower in Denmark than in any other country in the EU apart from France, with women in Sweden and Norway suffering wage discounts of 8 percent and 9 percent respectively.  

Women are also heavily underrepresented at the leadership level in Danish businesses, with women only making up 19 percent of board members of Danish companies and only 16 percent of directors.

This compares very poorly to neighbouring Norway, where gender quota laws have led to women taking up 41 percent of board seats.

Parental leave 

In 2021, women still took the largest share of parental leave by far, taking 278 days compared to just 36 for men. Since new rules came in in 2022, the number of fathers taking parental leave has increased by 40 percent, but the number of days men spend at home changing nappies still remains far below the time that new mothers put in. 

Violence 

One area where Denmark’s performance is deteriorating rather than improving is violence against women. Since 2015, there has been a sharp increase in the number of reports of violence against women, with 486 women per 100,000 making such a report in 2021, up from just 220 per 100,000 in 2015. 

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