By NICOLA CLARK

OSLO - Arni Hole remembers the shock wave that went through Norway’s business community in 2002 when the country’s trade and industry minister, Ansgar Gabrielsen, proposed a law requiring that 40 percent of all company board members be women.

“There were, literally, screams,” said Ms. Hole, director general of the Equality Ministry. “It was a real shock treatment.”

Even in this staunchly egalitarian society - 80 percent of Norwegian women work outside the home, and half the current government’s ministers are female - the idea seemed radical, if not for its goal, then for the sheer magnitude of change it would require.

Back then, Norwegian women held less than 7 percent of private-sector board seats; just under 5 percent of chief executives were women. After months of heated debate, the measure was approved by a significant majority in Parliament, giving state-owned companies until 2006 to comply and publicly listed companies until 2008.

Many prominent business leaders dismissed the 2003 law as a political stunt and argued that Norway, with just 4.8 million people, did not have enough experienced women to meet the quota. One chief executive of a software company told the business newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv that companies would have to recruit “escort girls” to meet the target.

Nearly eight years on, the share of female directors at the roughly 400 companies affected is above 40 percent, while women fill more than a quarter of the board seats at the 65 largest privately held companies. To many feminists, this is the boldest move anywhere to breach one of the most durable barriers to gender equality.

Indeed, the world has noticed: Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws, with a 2015 deadline for compliance. The French Senate will soon debate a bill phasing in a female quota by 2016, after the National Assembly approved the measure recently. Belgium, Britain, Germany and Sweden are considering legislation.

But researchers now are grappling with some frustrating facts: Bringing large numbers of women into Norway’s boardrooms has done little - yet - to improve either the professional caliber of the boards or to enhance performance. In fact, early evidence from a little-noticed study by the University of Michigan suggests that the immediate effect has been negative . And the sixfold increase in women as directors has not yet brought any real rise in the number of women as chief executives.

In the past 50 years, women have gained ever more prominence in politics and society. A decade into the 21st century, however, their corporate power remains slight - although women represent half or more of the work force in many countries.

In the European Union, 9.7 percent of the board members at the top 300 companies were women in 2008, versus 8 percent in 2004, according to the European Professional Women’s Network.

In the United States, roughly 15 percent of the board members of the Fortune 500 companies are women, while at the top of Asian companies, women remain scarce: In China and India, they hold roughly 5 percent of board seats, in Japan, just 1.4 percent.

Traditional tendencies die hard. The higher up the corporate ladder, the greater the perceived risk associated with choosing managers who are not “homogenous,” said Hilde Tonne, an executive vice president and head of communications at Telenor, a global telecommunications company based in Oslo. “Diversity is not as easy as you move up.”

When the Norwegian government first made its case for the quota, the number of women on boards had been growing by less than 1 percent a year for a decade. It would have taken 200 years, Ms. Hole said, to reach 40 percent.

The quota was sold to Norway’s business community as a way to gain greater social equity and competitive edge: “Profit is made by employing the best people, regardless of gender,” she said.

Some say that even in femalefriendly Norway, women are still not fighting for leadership posts.

“Power is not something that is given, it is something that you have to take,” said Benja Stig-Fagerland, a Danish economist who in 2003 helped lead an effort by the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise, the country’s main business lobby, to find female leaders. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a female oversell her capabilities.”

Some see potential risks in sacrificing experience for the sake of social equity.

“When you suddenly replace 30 percent to 40 percent of your board with inexperienced people, it is easier for those new members to be manipulated - that’s just common sense,” said Ruilf Rustad, a professional investor .

Proponents argued that the effects of greater boardroom diversity were more subtle, however, and that the arrival of fresher female talent brought genuine strategic benefits.

Ms. Tonne, an early skeptic, is today among those convinced that the longer-term effects of legislated diversity outweigh the short-term drawbacks.

“We have excluded women for 1,000 years,” she said, with a smile. “So we have already had quotas - it’s just that they were for men.”


Hilde Tonne, an executive vice president at Telenor, says diversity is harder to achieve at the higher ranks. / INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE