Improving Gender Balance among Directors of Companies. A Proposal for a European Directive and Recent Advances in Europe

This paper explores recent legal measures adopted in Europe to improve gender balance amongst directors of companies. It focuses on the Proposal for a European Directive on female board members and it refers in brief to different legal measures adopted at national level in many Member States of the European Union, as France, Italy, Spain or Germany. The paper argues that the approval of the proposed Directive must be seen as an urgent issue whereas the equality between women and men is one of the Union's founding values and core aims under the Treaty on European Union. Moreover, a consequence of not taking advantage of the skills of highly qualified women is a waste of talent that Europe can no longer afford. For these reasons the “flexibility” admitted by the compromised text of the proposed Directive (2014) seems excessive and it makes it difficult to understand why women should be less equal in some European member states than in others.