Norway on Saturday stepped up its efforts to make its boardrooms more gender-neutral by introducing a new law requiring at least 40 percent of its municipal-owned company boards to be female.
The Norwegian ministry of local government said the new law is the first of its kind in Europe and will go into effect on Friday.
Norway already made groundbreaking changes to its boardroom culture in 2002 by introducing a 40 percent female quota rule for listed and state-owned companies.
Since then, Spain has followed suit with rules for female board representation and France has proposed a similar law.
The new law is set to cover up to 1,500 companies in which the state has at least a two-third ownership. The ministry said the rules will have an implementation period of two years.
“There is no reason why municipal-owned companies should not be subject to the same rules for gender representation as a state corporation,” Local Government Minister Liv Signe Navarsete said, adding that women currently represent only about 30 percent of the board-members on those companies.
As of last year, all listed Norwegian companies on the Oslo stock exchange have also had to fill 40 percent of their board seats with women or face dissolution.
When the law was first proposed in 2002, women accounted for only 6 percent of Norwegian board seats.
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