Britain’s House of Lords, the less powerful of parliament’s two chambers, is often seen as quaintly old-fashioned and somewhat irrelevant. But business leaders across Europe would profit from reading “Women on Boards”, a report the house’s European Union affairs committee published in November after assessing oral and written evidence on how to put more women in high-level executive positions.
A week ago, the Lords held a debate on boardroom diversity whose quality was markedly superior to similar talks in “the other place” – as the Lords refer to the House of Commons. The Lords’ debate ended with approval of a motion which, like the report, deplored low levels of female board representation, but rejected EU-imposed quotas. Poland’s lower house of parliament took similar action on January 4, slapping down EU quotas by 333 to 60 votes with 35 abstentions.
Yet the message from these events is not that the cause of boardroom diversity is losing momentum. Far from it.