“Anti-Discrimination”: EU to legislate for compulsory gender quotas in board rooms?

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. | March 5, 2012

In today’s edition of the Financial Times we read the following:

The European Union’s executive is to press ahead with plans for quotas to increase the proportion of women on corporate boards, triggering a protracted fight between Brussels and national governments.

Viviane Reding, justice commissioner, will on Monday announce the first step towards European-level legislation, a year after she threatened mandatory measures if no progress was made on improving gender balance at the higher echelons of business.

This idea, which Commissioner Reding appears to be seriously considering, proves once again hjow Feminist ideology threatens the personal and economic freedom in Europe, to the detriment of the common good.

If a personal remark is allowed here: Mrs. Reding, whose intelligence and capabilities would in the best of cases qualify her for a low-grade secretary job somewhere in the European Commission’s department for Fisheries, but certainly not for the the job of a Vice-President of the EU executive with responsibilitiy for a key portfolio, is herself the best example for the dangers implied in promoting people on the sole basis of quotas. Her newest proposal just once again reveals her complete and absolute inaptitude for a job she owes to a variety of quotas relating to party affiliation, gender, and nationality.

To understand the palpable absurdity of the idea, it suffices to consider the following:

1. Even applying a quota that reserves 40% of all corporates boards membership to women, 99,9% of all women will never be sitting on any corporate boards. Thus, only an extremely small number of persons would actually benefit from such a quota, getting a job they otherwise would not be able to get.

2. This benefit for a very tiny group of persons would be acquired at the price of radically undermining right to property of all and everyone. Indeed, all shareholders of the companies concerned would be constrained to entrust the management of their companies not to those whom they consider best qualified, but to persons whose qualification is that they have the right sex. This is de facto an expropriation.

3. The proposal would be bad enough if it merely enabled women to live the existence of social parasites, providing them access to jobs with high salaries and little responsibility. But the problem is that board members actually have high responsibilities, and bad decisions by a board can cost a company its existence. A policy that imposes on companies to select any other than the best qualified persons as their board members is a real threat for the economy. The result will be that companies will seek to evade this policy wherever they can, possibly by transferring their corporate headquarters to Non-EU countries.

4. When in 2009 the Commission proposed the adoption of a horizontal “Anti-Discrimination Directive” to implement “the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation”, it based this controversial proposal on the argument that there should not be different rules with regard to different “grounds of discrimination”. To remain consistent with that argument, the Commission, if it proposes compulsory quotas for women, will also have to propose compulsory quotas for gays and lesbians, transgender and intersex persons, gipsies and Jews, Catholics and Muslims, and so forth… where does this begin, and where does it end?

5. Much in the same vein, if there are compulsory quotas for board rooms, it seems hardly justifiable not to introduce them in every other domain of social and economic life. In the end, all and everything could be dominated by quota considerations, and nobody could be appointed simply because he is apt for a given task.

6. Finally, it is hard to see how Mrs. Reding’s gender quota could be reconciled with Article 21 of the EU Fundamental Rights Charter, a provision that explicitly prohibits any discrimination on the grounds of sex. (It is true, though, that Article 23 of the same Charter provides that “the principle of equality shall not prevent the maintenance or adoption of measures providing for specific advantages in favour of the under-represented sex”. But with this provision the Charter contradicts its own principle of equality, rather than implementing it: following the wretched “Anti-Discrimination Directive”, what Mrs. Reding wants now is a “Pro-Discrimination Directiive”, one that makes discrimination compulsory.)

Fortunately, Mrs. Reding’s silly idea has no realistic chance of becoming reality. But it nevertheless is troubling to see that such proposals are made at a time where the EU is facing an existential crisis. Carnival is over, and we have more serious issues to consider.

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