Board quotas risk demeaning women, says equalities chief

Women risk being “demeaned” by EU quotas forcing companies to appoint more of them onto boards, equalities minister Helen Grant warned today.

She strongly opposed moves by the European Commission to force large companies to reserve at least 40 per cent of their non-executive director board seats for women by 2020.

Britain has joined eight other EU nations to thwart the Brussels drive to legislate on improving gender balance in business.

The UK believes that a voluntary approach, pressurising firms on this issue, is already working.

“Enforced quotas hang over us and business like the Sword of Damocles and that worries me,” Ms Grant told a fringe meeting on women on boards at the Conservative annual rally in Birmingham.

“That kind of positive discrimination can demean a woman’s real value ... and alienate men.”

The newly appointed minister from the 2010 intake of MPs, who is already being tipped for the Cabinet, stressed that research showed that gender-balanced boards tend to be “more stable, more sustainable and more profitable”.

“They tend to make better decisions about people, about risk and about their customers,” she said.

But she added that women need to be “more assertive” and take more “credit” for their actions to progress up the career ladder.

Ms Grant set up a firm of solicitors in 1996, specialising in problems of family breakdown and domestic violence.

She was also a non-executive director of Croydon NHS Primary Care Trust from January 2005 until March 2007.

She stressed that if the current progress to balance boards continues, the number of women directors will exceed the target set by former trade minister Lord Davies of 25 per cent by 2015 in FTSE 100 companies.

But far more women are being made non-executive directors than being promoted to executive roles on boards.

Mother-of-nine Helena Morrissey, the chief executive of Newton Investment Management, told Tory delegates that 55 per cent of non-executive directorships in the FTSE have gone to women new appointments since March 1.