Norway's female boardroom pioneer rejects quotas for women

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/24/norway-female-boardroom-ibsen-reject-quota

Version 0 of 1.

Women are still awaiting a gender revolution in Britain's boardrooms but Norway's corporate culture has undergone a radical change that has transformed the career of one woman in particular.

At one point Mai-Lill Ibsen held more than 185 Norwegian boardroom seats and was undisputed queen of the so called "golden skirts" – experienced executive women who found themselves in demand when Norway in 2006 passed a law requiring 40% of boardroom seats to go to women (or men in the rare case of a female-dominated directors' suite).

In fact, 57 year-old Ibsen favoured a sober trouser suit rather than a skirt for a meeting in Westminster this week where she outlined the impact of the Norwegian quota system.

She objects to the golden skirts label and complaints that some women get several boardroom roles. A former banker, Ibsen points out that no one talks about the "many golden suits" – men with multiple directorships.

Nonetheless, Ibsen opposes the quota system as a way to get women into the highest echelons of business. "I've never seen the glass ceiling," she says, raising her arms against an imaginary barrier. "I'm against quotas. They are discriminatory in a way. I feel we [women] are so strong we don't need that.

"If someone wants to have me as a token, they would get more than they bargained for."

Ibsen's executive brief is less packed now. About 165 of her seats were attached to one boardroom position, at the Unifor Foundation which provides charitable donations. She recently left that post and now sits on only 10 boards. The highest profile of these is at the Norwegian state pension fund Folketrygdfondet, which owns 5% of every listed company in the country, restricting her ability to join other boards.

After graduating from Stanford University in California, Ibsen began her career in 1983 at a Norwegian bank and two years later joined the country's export credit agency, where she stayed until 2001. She then ran Citigroup in Oslo, leaving in 2005 for a year managing the local derivatives clearing house.

Her career as a serial non-executive director began when she quit the bank and she is now regarded as an authority on the subject of women in the boardroom, travelling the world to discuss how to boost the number of women in top jobs. In London for one such debate this week, she brandishes a slide showing that the term "golden skirt" should equally be applied to men, who also hold multiple seats on boards. The proportion of male directors holding four or more Norwegian boardroom posts 1%; for women it is 2%.

She draws gasps from her audience in a packed parliamentary committee room as she explains how 40% of businesses avoided the new quota law by converting into private limited companies. Two-thirds of them admitted the quota rules were behind their decision to delist from the stock exchange. Ibsen has been on boards of companies that made the switch – one had too many men, the other too many women.

In Britain, the government is taking a voluntary approach to quotas, urging 25% female presence in boardrooms by 2015 for FTSE 100 companies. While UK statistics show eight are still holding out as men-only clubs, they also show that outside the boardroom the flow of women coming up through the ranks is not growing. The same appears to be true in Norway. "The ripple effects are not that big," said Ibsen.

Married to a banker and with a son seemingly destined for banking, she was involved in structuring some complex financial instruments sold in the run-up to the financial crisis – but not the sub-prime mortgages that triggered the credit crunch.

She had the first of her two sons in 1990 while at the export finance agency, taking eight months' maternity leave and her husband took four months. They repeated the process three years later when their second was born; such parental leave is now more common in Norway, but they were trailblazers.

She admits to having been courted for FTSE 100 boardroom roles in Britain. "I don't think I felt ready for it," she says, explaining that London-listed companies are very different from those listed in Oslo. "Those particular companies are very big … Although I have a lot of experience from the Nordics and worked for a US bank, it doesn't mean I know everything about how things happen here."

She sees a boardroom as "power areas" and urges aspiring directors to be enthusiastic about the companies they join – in contrast to some she encounters. "I work in competent boardrooms where people are only lukewarm about the companies. You need to care about the companies and care about their success."

<strong>Cable on the case</strong><br />

Although Britain lags behind Norway in taking active steps to redress the gender imbalance in boardrooms, the business secretary, Vince Cable, has pledged to take action over the issue. Last month he said he would write to the heads of the eight FTSE 100 firms that still have men-only boardrooms. The eight – Antofagasta, Croda, Glencore, Xstrata, Kazakhmys, Melrose, Randgold and Vedanta – are largely comprised of mining and natural resources companies with headquarters outside Britain. Cable said businesses must "challenge the paternalistic culture and silent assumptions about women's priorities that are ultimately keeping the glass ceiling in place".