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When Christine Stimpel talks about her work, she sometimes sounds like she is looking for precious gemstones.
Sometimes she digs up a diamond here, sometimes a “real jewel” there.
Stimpel is a headhunter, she fills positions for the international personnel consultancy Heidrick & Struggles up to the DAX board.
Most recently, she came across a woman in the United States who she considers such a jewel.
In the American provinces, says Stimpel, there is a clever woman of German descent who has built up a chain of blood banks over the past 20 years.
“For a German life science company, your know-how is worth its weight in gold,” says Stimpel.
Highly qualified women with management experience are more in demand in Germany than ever.
A competition for the best women has broken out among headhunters.
There is already a legal quota for women on supervisory boards in Germany, and now there is also a quota for boards of large listed companies.
A corresponding draft law by the federal government could also have a pull effect.
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The time for change is pressing.
The Federal Cabinet has just passed a bill, which the Bundestag and Bundesrat will probably support.
According to this, at least one woman should sit on the executive boards of listed companies with more than 2000 employees, which have more than three members.
If this happens, around 70 companies in the country will be affected, 30 of which so far have no women on their boards.
It won't be easy to find many candidates for the position of IT manager
Spencer Stuart's headhunters have rushed ahead with a full-bodied promise: From now on, half of every suggestion list for customers looking for a new board member should be women.
The woman who brought this idea forward is called Tanja Svjetlanovic.
She is 32 years old, grew up as the daughter of Bosnian-Serb immigrants in Austria and has been with Spencer Stuart for five years.
There she is a member of a small group of six people called the “Diversity Task Force”.
In the end, this was what convinced the partnership.
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"That is of course a statement from us," says the consultant.
“We want to encourage ourselves and our customers to think in other, more complex directions.” Of course, it won't be easy to put eight to ten candidates on a list of candidates for the post of “Chief Technology Officer” or an IT manager in the automotive industry bring.
You have to look for talent and include related industries.
"Perhaps we can also encourage our customers to make some specifications more broadly in their tenders," says Svjetlanovic.
"It is possible that a suitable board candidate does not necessarily have to have managed x thousand employees in the end if she has other, important qualifications."
Alone under five men
So far, the corporations that operate worldwide have apparently not looked too broadly.
Of the 30 companies listed in the Dax, according to a current analysis by Heidrick & Struggles, seven have no women on the board.
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Deutsche Wohnen, HeidelbergCement and the semiconductor manufacturer Infineon are as womenless at the top as the industrial gas manufacturer Linde and the engine manufacturer MTU.
The young internet company Delivery Hero has not yet had any female reinforcements for the board.
At least one woman, Victoria Ossadnik, has been designated for the board of the energy giant E.on.
She is to lead the newly created digitization department from April.
Adidas appointed HR manager Amanda Rajkumar to the board at the turn of the year.
Sarena Lin will take up her position as Chief Transformation Officer at Bayer in February.
Just like her colleague at Adidas, she is only one of five men on the executive committee.
The pressure is increasing elsewhere too.
According to an evaluation by Heidrick & Struggles, there are currently a total of 53 companies without a board member in the three stock market segments Dax, MDax and TechDax.
In the MDax it is almost two thirds of the companies, in the TechDax almost three quarters.
The market is becoming more competitive
The situation is even worse for large family businesses.
According to figures from the Swedish-German AllBright Foundation from last year, less than seven percent of the members of the executive boards of the 100 top-selling German family businesses are women.
For example at Aldi, Bertelsmann, Bosch, Oetker or Haniel.
Christian Böhnke has been focusing specifically on women for 14 years.
In 2007 he co-founded the first personnel consultancy in the German-speaking area, which was entirely dedicated to she-placement.
"Hunting Her" is the name of the company that is now part of the US personnel consultancy Staton Chase.
His focus is still Germany and its women leaders.
However, the market is becoming more competitive.
"From the stock exchange group to the upper medium-sized company, panic is now breaking out in many cases," says Böhnke.
"Everyone tries to attract the best talent."
However, they cannot be found without effort.
"If you take the search for women seriously, the effort increases enormously without a specific approach," reports Böhnke.
"To find a suitable woman for a certain position, you often have to turn twenty times as many stones as a man."
Most German companies are still a long way from being women-led
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This also increases the costs.
The expense could be worth it, as a recent report from Peacon shows.
The software company for analyzing employee engagement surveyed almost 60,000 employees from 43 countries and found that women-run companies have more committed employees.
Women bosses could better unite people behind a mission.
Their employees agreed significantly more often with the following statement: "The general business goals and strategies that were set by top management are leading our company in the right direction." In the report, companies with more women were considered to be "women-led" than 50 percent in management.
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Most companies in Germany are still a long way from achieving this, even if the subject has become more important in recent years.
In 2012, EU Commissioner Vivian Reding stimulated the debate by calling for an EU-wide binding female quota of 40 percent on supervisory boards.
The quota for Germany came in 2016: In more than 100 large listed companies that are subject to co-determination, 30 percent of the supervisory boards must be women.
Now, for the first time, there should also be a specification for the operationally active board members.
Like solving a criminal case
Not only the USA, but also many European countries have long been further than Germany.
In comparative studies such as the European Women on Boards Gender Diversity Index, Norway, France, Sweden and Great Britain score significantly better.
According to a survey by the AllBright Foundation, women in 2020 held 25 percent of all board positions in listed companies.
In Germany it was ten percent.
Liv Gorosch is one of those who helped put women in Sweden's boardrooms.
The qualified criminalist co-founded the Swedish company WES, Women Executive Search, ten years ago and continues to look for suitable candidates investigatively to this day.
You have to imagine it as if you were solving a criminal case, she says.
The search profiles would be very broad.
The result: WES has filled more than 900 management positions so far, 75 percent of them with women.
"We even helped 400 different companies to recruit the first CEO, the first CFO or the first ever female board member."
In doing so, says Gorosch, she also had the support of investors.
In recent years it has become clear that diversity is not just a concern of management, but increasingly also one of the owners.
"We are now working with around ten venture capital firms, all of whom are trying to find various management teams and board members in their portfolio companies."
Swedish investor as a role model
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A Swedish investor who strongly urges women in leadership in her investments is also well known in this country: Christina Stenbeck.
She owns the billion dollar Kinnevik fund, with which she co-financed the growth of the online retailer Zalando.
There are five women on the supervisory board and four men.
By the end of 2023, 40 to 60 percent of operational management should also be in female hands - on the top six management levels of the 14,000-strong fashion platform.
There are still five men on the board.
The “target zero”, which they set their legs apart in the 2018 annual report, will soon be a thing of the past.
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Source: Welt am Sonntag