The drawbacks of the quota    By JAN LÜTTRINGHAUS

Suddenly, the quota is "in". Some German ministries are becoming convinced that this is a suitable instrument to ultimately ensure more women at management level in companies - and they are not the only ones: Norway and Spain already have quota regulations, and legislators in France and the Netherlands are not far behind. Those who advocate a quota of women base their opinions on investigations like the annual Women Matter Studies by management consultants McKinsey which ascribe a positive effect to the "female factor", namely that women manage differently and therefore make a significant contribution to a company's economic success. This approach advocates the presence of several rather than one woman because only the interaction between multiple women can effectively break the male decision-making pattern. However, because the number of women in management positions has hardly risen at all over the last few years, the advocates of this strategy are now insisting on jump starting the process by implementing a fixed-term quota for supervisory boards and management boards.

Indeed, it is hard to comprehend economically, particularly in times when there is a shortage of skilled labour, why the huge potential of female applicants is not utilised at all hierarchy levels. As their average degree results show, women are just as well qualified as men, and in many cases even better. It seems positively shameful, therefore, that women only hold around 2.4 percent of management posts in Germany's 500 largest companies. In the discussion in Germany, however, the fact that other countries' experiences with positive discrimination have not always been positive has so far been rarely acknowledged. The strategy goes under different names, such as affirmative action in the USA and quota in Germany, but its aim is the same, i.e. to counterbalance past inequalities and their consequences - by imposing new inequalities in the present. Positive discrimination is still discrimination.

"Positive discrimination" digs a deeper hole

The Ricci versus DeStefano lawsuit in the USA has become famous in this context. Fireman Frank Ricci worked particularly hard to gain management responsibility. Despite his dyslexia, he passed the aptitude test with a score that was among the highest. And yet, he and 18 other firemen were denied advancement and the test declared invalid. The employer's reason was this: the people who failed the test were the very people that the affirmative action measures were supposed to favour - in this case African Americans. The employer feared their complaints if he chose other (more qualified) applicants - and in so doing discriminated against people like Frank Ricci who had worked particularly hard. This brings the hard won equality postulate into question, as the Supreme Court judges involved in the case also felt.

Female quotas put equally qualified men at a disadvantage solely on grounds of their gender. They can also cause the group that is "discriminated against" to lose its incentive to achieve - success seems to be denied them from the outset, so why should they bother to make the effort? This unequal treatment therefore almost inevitably leads to animosity between the applicant groups. The very differences that positive discrimination is attempting to overcome become paradoxically more accentuated and more profound.

The successes of the favoured group, on the other hand, never quite lose the bitter aftertaste of having been achieved due to preferential treatment and not primarily through merit. Furthermore, the members of the favoured group who benefit from a quota are mostly those who already have an advantage. This is the conclusion of the American economist Thomas Sowell in his empirical investigation Affirmative Action Around the World. The latest statistics from the Center for Corporate Diversity in Oslo are the best example of this. In Norway, the country that was the first to introduce a mandatory female quota of 40 percent on average for the management bodies of companies, over 300 of the management positions allotted to women are shared among an elite of around only 70 female top managers. Each of these women therefore holds four positions on average.

People with families will continue to be left behind

It is obvious that people with such a huge workload will have little time left over for their families. In studies on gender quotas, women who master the astonishing feat of balancing family with a demanding job are ascribed particularly good management skills such as awareness of responsibility, solution orientation, empathy and good communication skills. However, it is more than doubtful whether this target group, which is particularly in demand for management positions, would actually benefit from positive discrimination.

Having children is still a hindrance to a career. While childless women and working fathers, who leave most of the childcare to their partner, are climbing the career ladder, many women in the decisive phase between 30 and 40 often drop out for several years - a career interruption that even the most highly qualified among them often never manage to make up for. Positive gender discrimination will not change this. On the contrary, it is more likely to elevate childless people and those with no ties to management roles while people with families - from both sexes - will continue to be left behind. Another problem is coming to light in Norway, where only companies with a particular legal form were required to introduce the quota. As a consequence, between 2001 and 2008, which was around the time the quota started to be discussed, the number of companies with this legal form dropped by 23 percent, as a study by the University of Michigan shows. During the same period, the number of companies with other legal forms rose, and Norwegian firms fled abroad.

When the quota was announced, the companies' shareholder values fell by 2.6 percent on average and by up to 5 percent for companies that had no women yet at all in their management bodies. The head of the study, Amy Dittmar, explains this in terms of the companies' fears that many women who were now suddenly to be elevated to senior management roles might lack management expertise. All these experiences show that rigid gender quotas have drawbacks. Better childcare provision might be much more beneficial than any quota, especially for women who want to combine career and family. What about a "voluntary commitment" by the state and the business community to create more child day-care centres? As soon as companies recognise that women in management positions promote the economic well-being of the organisation, a force comes into play that is more powerful than any enforced social-policy measures: companies start competing for qualified women out of economic self-interest.

From DIE ZEIT :: 17.02.2011