136 female board members in the 160 companies of the leading stock market indices Dax, MDax and SDax mean a share of almost 20 percent at the beginning of the year, as the Stuttgart-based management consultancy and auditing firm EY announced in a study on Friday. That is 14 women more than a year earlier - and more than twice as many as at the beginning of 2021 (65). However, only seven of the 160 companies are run by a woman, three of the 40 Dax members: Belen Garijo has been CEO of Merck since 2021, and on October 1, Bettina Orlopp joined Commerzbank and Karin Radström Daimler Truck.
Of the 85 new or promoted board members last year, 30 were women - that's 35 percent. Of the 74 board members who left or were dismissed, 16 were female. EY has calculated that 101 of the 160 management boards (63 percent) now have at least one woman on them, and 26 boards even have two or more women (16 percent). However, this also means that 37 percent of management bodies continue to be purely male domains. In companies with more than three board members, at least one woman has been required by law to sit on the board since 2022. However, this affects fewer than half of the companies analyzed.
"Despite the progress we are definitely seeing, the road to the executive level remains rocky for women – whether middle management or the top of the company," says Ev Bangemann, Head of Climate Change and Sustainability at EY in Germany. "In addition, it has been proven that women take longer to get into top positions, but stay there for a shorter period of time than men." Quotas alone are therefore not enough. "German companies have not yet reached their goal in terms of diversity, but they are on the right track."
The highest proportion of women can be found in the 40 Dax companies, where they make up 26 percent of the board members. But even there, there are still two all-male boards. In the MDax, the proportion of women is 20 percent, and in the SDax, 14 percent. Almost half of the women on the board are responsible for either finance (26 percent) or human resources (23 percent).
(Report by Alexander Hübner, edited by Ralf Banser. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)