Deutsche Telekom to Introduce Quota for Female Managers

New York Times ^ | March 15, 2010 | Nicola Clark

[reaganaut1]

Europe’s largest telecommunications company, Deutsche Telekom, said Monday that it would more than double the number of its female managers within five years, becoming the first member of Germany’s DAX-30 index of blue-chip companies to introduce gender quotas.

The move comes amid increasing political pressure on companies across Europe to increase women’s representation among their leadership ranks and to address persistent gender gaps in areas such as pay and professional opportunity.

Deutsche Telekom said it planned to increase the number of women in senior and middle management to 30 percent by 2015, from 12 percent today. The company said the quota would apply to roughly 15,000 leadership positions worldwide.

“Taking on more women in management positions is not about the enforcement of misconstrued egalitarianism,” the company’s chief executive, René Obermann, said in a statement. “Having a greater number of women at the top will quite simply enable us to operate better.”

To meet its target, the company — Germany’s third-largest after the engineering group Siemens and E.ON, a utility company — plans to step up its recruiting of female university graduates and require that at least 30 percent of the places in executive development programs be held by women, said Anne Wenders, a Deutsche Telekom spokeswoman.

The company also plans to expand existing parental leave programs and introduce more flexible working hours for managers: Currently, fewer than 1 percent of the company’s managers work part time.

Of Deutsche Telekom’s global workforce of 258,000, 52 percent are in Germany, where women — especially working mothers — continue to lag behind many of their European peers in workplace participation and earn significantly less than their male peers.

A survey of 600 companies in 20 countries published this month by the World Economic Forum ranked German companies 15th in terms of female employees

[reaganaut1]

Many feminists believe that bearing and raising children is a distraction from the paid work women should be doing, and Germany, like the rest of Europe, does have a low birth rate. But it still appears that women are "underrepresented" at the top, so now governments and big companies resort to quotas. Of course, female (and male) consumers and shareholders care about a company's earnings and products, not the sex (excuse me, "gender") of its managers.

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

Makes about as much sense as electing someone to high office based upon the color of their skin.

[HiTech RedNeck]

The return of “Ma” Bell?

[RobRoy]

Sounds a bit sexist.

[Nervous Tick]

Germany’s third-largest after the engineering group Siemens and E.ON, a utility company — plans to step up its recruiting of female university graduates and require that at least 30 percent of the places in executive development programs be held by women

[RobRoy]

I think the only two things that REALLY matter are man’s relationship with man and his relationship with his Creator. It is what the bible, the ten commandments, and Christianity is all about.

A family with one bread winner (or a home business) is bigger on relationships than a family with both parents working outside the home. Wealth increases while relationships suffer.

Don’t get me wrong. If both have to work outside the home just for the family to survive, well, that is another matter. But, by “survive” I don’t mean make the motorhome payments.

[BenKenobi]

Sell! Sell! This can’t be good for the bottom line.

Promote based on ability and talent, not the bits that should have nothing to do with the job.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Resume.......check

Diploma......check

References.....check

Vagina......check

[ishabibble]

Two words: Harriet Harmann

The British are currentlnly undergoing ths BS.

[aquila48]

“Sell! Sell! This can’t be good for the bottom line.”

And buy, buy China and India and any other place that doesn’t practice this stupidity.

Nothing against women, everything in favor of merit.

[DemonDeac]

A huge issue of course is that most of the people in 2010 with management experience and the criteria you want to lead are men. Maybe in 50 years there will be as many qualified female business leaders as men and they can serve in large numbers on boards. I’d have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is social engineering that, rather than seek to help improve the applicant pool and society as a whole, simply lowers the bars for certain preferred groups. I don’t see how that benefits women or the company in the long run.

[Moltke]

Deutsche Telekom, that is, their telecommunication products - T-Com, T-Online, T-Mobile, have been horrendous to deal with in the past. Now they plan to make it worse by structuring management by sex instead of qualifications. *claps hands* Nice plan, there, you idiots.

Oh, needless to say, this has been precipitated by some moronic EU “findings.”

(How much would it cost to get someone to drop some nukes on Brussels? I’d chip in for that.)

[flowerplough]

” ...first member of Germany’s DAX-30 index of blue-chip companies to introduce gender quotas.”

They’re admitting hard quotas? Most of the big, multi-global corps are more coy. Goals, targets, objectives, that’s what I usually hear.