Norway:
Female Quota
Report: Christa Hofmann
Camera: Martin Weiss
Editing: Mario Danninger
Inserts:
Kirsti Kierulf (Angelika)
Manager, Board Member
Ansgar Gabrielsen (Martin)
Former Minister of Trade and Commerce
Benja Stig Fagerland (Angelika)
Company Consultant, Board Member
Tore Fagerland (Martin)
Businessman
Trygve Hegnar
Media Entrepreneur
Jan Petterson (Martin)
Manager
Kate Rodin (Angelika)
Businesswoman
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0.04
Equal opportunities are big in Norway. For a long time many of the Norwegians involved in politics and state enterprises have been female. Now this is also true of the private sector in a unique way: companies listed on the stock exchange must legally ensure that forty percent of their executives are women.
0.24
Kirsti Kierulf is one of these women. She is the head of an international consultation firm, and a member of the boards of five enterprises, from technology to real estate.
0.35
OT Kirsti Kierulf, Manager, Board Member
[We have a huge population of women who have the leadership experience that they are asking for, and unless you use quotation as a tool which we know experience-wise is the tool that quickest will implement a change, this will take thousands of years and we will continue making repetitive copies of ourselves, and for the world we will then lose the innovation power that lies in diversity.]
1.05
The quota law has opened up opportunities in Kirsti’s own career which she might otherwise not have had.
1.12
OT Kirsti Kierulf, Manager, Board Member
[This has given me an immense opportunity to be a part of the network, contribute to the network but also get back from the network, and if this law hadn’t been there, this opportunity hadn’t been for me.]
1.26 open
1.32
The progressive step of making the quota into a law came from a man, the former conservative Minister of Trade and Commerce. At that time the proportion of women on Norwegian management boards was roughly seven percent – as is still the case in Austria.
1.48
OT Ansgar Gabrielsen, former Minister of Trade and Commerce
[My motivation was first and foremost to use the whole population. They were educated, both girls and boys, for the last 20, 30 years equally, and it was first and foremost for creating value in the company – to use all our resources. It was not an equality question first of all.]
2.15
OT Christa
Before you announced the quota, you didn’t consult a single government member, not even one from your own party. Why was that?
2.23
OT Ansgar Gabrielsen, former Minister of Trade and Commerce
[Well, that was very easy, because if I had asked the answer would have been NO. So I did it without asking anyone – not the prime minister, not my party leader, not the parliament group, no one. That was calculated, and I knew that if I do it my way, I will get the goal – and I got it.]
2.45
OT Christa
What was the reaction?
2.47
OT Ansgar Gabrielsen, ehem. Wirtschaftsminister
[The reaction was hell, in a way – it was trouble all over. But after one and a half years, when it came up in the parliament, a very wide range of parties supported me in the end and I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s not a question anymore in Norway.]
3.07
open
3.09
Elsewhere the quota is still in question, and every week more questions are asked. People everywhere want to know more about Norway’s experience with women in the economy.
3.19
open
3.26
These future female executives are clear on that subject.
3.37
Benja Stig Fagerland is a company consultant who trains women in business operations and management. Both she and her husband take equal care of their daughters.
3.52
OT Benja Stig Fagerland, Company Consultant
[I actually think it’s more 60% you and 40% me, because you are taking the girls to kindergarten school every day, and you are a male member of the parents’ group at the school.]
4.06
OT Tore Fagerland, Businessman
[I think that’s part of the whole equality, isn’t it? That depending on, of course, the kind of work, that both the mother and father step in when needed.]
4.21
Benja seeks out female managers for a state project called ‘pearl-divers’.
4.27
OT Benja Stig Fagerland, Company Consultant
[The whole point of the process for the project was to get the companies to focus in on who is our talent in our organisations and make them be aware of all the female talents that they already had in their own organisations; and therefore they had to dive after female pearls that had the competence and also had the ambitions to take management positions – but females that they haven’t included into the top positions yet.]
4.58
We meet Norway’s most prominent opponent of the female quota. Trygve Hegnar is a media tycoon and ship owner. He collects ships’ figureheads – strong women fashioned out of wood.
What troubles him more than anything about the quota is the fact it represents government interference in the private sector.
5.19
OT Trygve Hegnar, Media Entrepreneur
I believe that the majority of businessmen in Austria would say: How? Should I not control my own business concerns? How: shouldn’t I decide who sits on my committee? Must I find a woman? Must I? They have taken these rights away from business owners. For me that is the decisive factor.
And what I find really extraordinary is that no one has dared to say no. It is not saying no to women’s rights. It’s not doing that.
5.54
Norway’s women have always been regarded as independent. When their husbands went to sea, they were often left on their own for months on end.
6.04
Nowadays, a progressive family policy has brought Norway a high birth rate along with their high rate of female employment.
Man and wife in family and society is also a constant theme for Norwegian artists.
6.21
In order to share out childcare in a better way, there is an eighty percent wage continuation during maternity leave in Norway – and obligatory paternity leave.
6.33 OPEN
6.38
After work with Kirsti and her family. Her husband Jan believes that gender equality in the economy is not a women’s issue, but rather a managerial issue.
6.47 OT Jan Petterson, Manager
[When you get too many old guys with the same background, the same education and clubs and so on, it doesn’t work. You have to have much more variety in the board to get enough of other visions and other sights.]
7.08 Kirsti Kierulf, Manager, Board Member (aus dem OFF)
[I think it’s gonna be real interesting to see both in leadership teams and in boards now, whether or not the one with diversity will win or lose. I think like Jan that the ones that had diversity coming into the crisis are better positioned.]
7.23
Businesswoman Kate Rodin is convinced that companies with more women in management positions and on supervisory boards are better administered.
7.32
OT Kate Rodin, Businesswoman, Author
[We don’t feel the same harm of the crisis as it seems to be in other countries. It’s not the one single reason for that, but I cannot ignore that maybe the influence from females, at least this gender act, has improved our strength to meet the crisis. Maybe decisions haven’t been taken that is too risky – I don’t know. But anyway, the fact is that Norway has this gender act today, and we are not suffering so heavily as other countries are.]
8.05 open
8.07
So what advantages does it hold for the man when his wife is a board member?
8.11 open
OT Kirsti Kierulf, Manager, Board Member
[He has been for a lot of nice dinners...]
8.17 OT Jan Petterson, Manager (jokingly, ironically)
[Ja, I’ve been a partner when the board members could take their partners. There’s been me and mostly women. It has happened that I have made a small speech for the partners.]
8.38
Not everyone is so enlightened. In Norway, the quota law continues to arouse much debate.