Europe's news in English

COPY LINK

WORKING IN NORWAY

Norway to strengthen gender quota laws

Norway, a gender equality pioneer, plans to expand its quota system to the boards of several thousand additional companies, its government said Monday.

Published: 13 December 2022 09:14 CET

Norway will reinforce its gender quota laws. Pictured is a business meeting.

Norway will reinforce its gender quota laws. Pictured is a business meeting. Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Since 2004, state-owned company boards must be comprised of at least 40 percent women, with that rule being applied to publicly traded firms since 2008.

Norway now wants to extend this rule to between 10,000 and 25,000 additional companies, or about three to seven percent of the country’s total.

“Twenty years ago, we had 15 percent of women on boards of companies, and today we have 20 percent,” said Norwegian Trade and Industry Minister Jan Christian Vestre in a statement. “If we continue at this pace, we will never reach our goal.”

The minority coalition government will need to gather support in parliament to move forward with this proposal, which may see modifications.

Thanks to Norway’s quota law, women now make up 43 percent of boards of large publicly traded companies, but only nine percent of top executives, the
numbers of which are not regulated by quotas.

The European parliament, meanwhile, has ratified new rules requiring major companies in the European Union — of which Norway is not a member — to fill
at least 40 percent of non-executive board seats or 33 percent of all board seats “with the underrepresented gender” from July 2026.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Why overqualified foreigners in Norway struggle to find work

Norway is one of many European countries struggling with “brain waste”, which is where immigrants struggle to find suitable full-time work or are overqualified for their roles due to their education not being recognised.

The findings are part of an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, the Financial Times, El País and Unbias The News that found that most European countries fail to provide good job opportunities to educated foreigners – potentially at the cost of their labour forces and economies.

“While the results differ slightly between labour market outcomes, a consistent pattern emerges: immigrants lag behind natives everywhere, but brain waste is worst in Southern Europe, Norway, and Sweden,” the report read.

Some of the metrics used to measure brain waste were the proportion of foreign residents who were overqualified for their role, underemployed (meaning they weren’t working as much as they could), or unemployed.

In Norway, 27.6 percent of university-educated Norwegians were overqualified for their roles, according to the report. Meanwhile, just over half of the university-educated immigrant population were overqualified for their job.

This figure made Norway one of the countries with the largest raw difference in the percentage of the native population being overqualified compared to the immigrant population.

Furthermore, the number of immigrants who were underemployed, 3.9 percent, was more than double the rate of Norwegians in the same position.

The investigation used figures from Eurostat between 2017 and 2022.

Norway’s Directorate of Integration and Diversity has recently investigated the obstacles facing the country’s foreign population in the workplace.

Its report found that immigrants faced barriers both when trying to progress their careers or simply trying to get their foot in the door.

Immigrants working in Norway were also more likely to leave working life earlier or lose their jobs.

READ ALSO: The biggest barriers foreigners in Norway face at work

Factors such as working in temp positions, physically taxing occupations, and industries exposed to economic turbulence contributed to this.

However, a lack of Norwegian proficiency, a lack of relevant skills and poor health also played a part.

Discrimination prevented immigrants from entering the workplace and affected those who were employed.

“More and more people in the population have contact with immigrants in working life, and most experience that contact as mainly positive. At the same time, one in four immigrants has experienced discrimination in the workplace, and this discrimination can occur in different forms and in different working situations,” the report read.

The directorate also said that most companies didn’t have concrete measures to try and promote diversity.

One factor holding back immigrants in Norway was their Norwegian language skills, the report said.

While Norwegian skills were moving in the right direction, less than half of foreigners in the country had advanced Norwegian language skills (level B2 according to the European framework) after completing language training.

Meanwhile, Lighthouse Reports’ investigation found that brain waste in Norway varied from profession to profession. For example, Norway was one of a number of countries where college-educated immigrants were more likely to be doctors.

Immigrants with a university education in IT-related subjects were also far less likely to be overqualified. There, the difference between migrants being overqualified compared to natives was just 2 percent.

However, physical and engineering science technicians, engineering professionals (excluding electrotechnology), and those who have studied education at a university level were the immigrant groups in Norway most likely to be overqualified.

One thing to note is that immigrants who obtained their qualifications in Norway were far less likely to be overqualified than those who got their degrees outside of Norway, even if they still fared worse than natives overall.

Url copied to clipboard!