The Golden Skirt and Norway's boardroom bias

Mimi Berdal is a woman who knows how to smash through a glass ceiling.

In fiercely egalitarian Norway, where women are required by law to make up 40 per cent of board memberships, Mrs Berdal is the poster girl for women in business. The most gilded of her country's "Golden Skirts" - women who sit on multiple boards - she was at one time on the board of 90 different companies, making her the country's most sought-after female executive.

Yet, despite being a high-profile beneficiary of Norway's pioneering policy, the 52 year-old has mixed feelings about a controversial new European Union initiative to spring more women into boardroom roles. Indeed, the smartly-suited blonde lawyer argues that it would be better if quotas were not necessary.

"On principle, I do not believe in too much regulation on the private sphere," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "It would have been much better if this had happened on a voluntary basis.

"Some women, including myself, feel that law regulation in private companies is a complicated issue," she said, adding that it would be better for the boardroom balance to evolve naturally.

Mrs Berdal's caution may come as a shock to those who praise Norway's business community as a model of how to get more women into the boardroom. Across Europe, only 13.7 per cent of board members from large companies are women, while in Italy the figure falls to a mere 6.1 per cent. In Britain 15.6 per cent of FTSE 100 board directorships are held by women.

Mrs Berdal's comments come in the wake of this month's launch by Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, of a three-month consultation on how to redress the gender imbalance in the boardroom. Member states, business organisations and firms are being canvassed for their views as "stakeholders", and asked what sanctions could be used against companies that fail to hit targets.

However, while critics say that quota schemes are both ineffective and patronising to women, the tone of the consultation paper suggests Ms Reding has already made up her mind on the matter.

Nowhere does the paper ask whether quotas are a good idea in principle. Instead, it poses questions such as: "Which objectives (e.g. 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent, 60 per cent) should be defined for the share of the under-represented sex on company boards?"

Ms Reding, a feisty former journalist from Luxembourg, is not afraid to lecture other European nations on the importance of progressive policies. In 2010, she sparked a furious row with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, when she likened his plans to deport Roma immigrants to the policies of the Holocaust.

"Personally, I am not a great fan of quotas, but I like the results they bring," she said.

Supporters of the compulsory targets say they would break the "old boy's network" cycle and rapidly redress an imbalance that would otherwise take decades to rectify. Opponents claim quotas will simply lead to women being put on boards to make up numbers, and that the Norwegian experience bears this out.

"Quotas are a tool and they can be very effective," Ms Reding insisted. "It's clear that they can be a solution when the top positions in companies are blocked for women. There is nothing demeaning about bringing diversity to Europe's companies."

She said Finland led the way in the EU, with 27 per cent female membership of boardrooms, but that otherwise the picture overall was still "bleak", with only one in seven female board members in Europe's top companies, and only one in 30 acting as boardroom chairmen.

But the idea of EU interference on the composition of boards has caused consternation in Britain. An annual study of boardroom gender by the Cranfield School of Management, published last week, said there had already been a "significant move in the right direction" since the publication of a report by Lord Davies a year ago calling for companies to voluntarily increase the number of women on their boards.

"Quotas are not only needless but potentially damaging and actually undermine the very equality the pro-quota lobby seeks," said Helena Morrissey, CEO of Newton Investment Management and founder of the 30 Per Cent Club - an organisation aiming to get more women on to boards - and a mother of nine.

"Investors don't want quotas - board directors need to be there on merit and there's evidence that shareholder value can be destroyed if quotas are imposed," she wrote in a recent article.

Critics also point out that while Norway has 40 per cent female non-executive directors, only two per cent of its chief executive officers - who wield the real power - are women. But it will come as no surprise that socially progressive Norway has led the way.

"Norway doesn't just live off oil, it also lives off equality," said Audun Lysbakken, who until earlier this month was the head of Norway's Ministry for Children, Equality and Social Inclusion. "This increases our productivity because more people are active in all fields of working life."

The Scandinavian nation tops European statistics on participation of women in the workforce, and was also the world's first to introduce paternity leave. Fathers are currently entitled to 10 weeks parental leave - as opposed to just two in Britain - and couples can opt for either 46 weeks' leave on full pay, or 56 weeks' on 80 per cent pay.

But even so, men and women were initially reluctant about the quota system, arguing that it demeaned women and would bring in an influx of inexperienced people who might not have otherwise got the job.

It has also created the phenomenon of the so-called "Golden Skirts", a group of about 70 women who hold multiple directorships, allegedly because there is not enough female business talent to go around.

But Mrs Berdal said the term "Golden Skirt" was itself sexist, pointing out that male colleagues with similar roles were referred to as "well-known businessmen", not "golden trousers".

She said she was broadly supportive of the quota system as a necessary step, even though she disliked the principle of interference in boards. She also denied the targets had adversely affected the profitability of Norwegian companies.

"If women are just there as 'tokens', then the nomination committee is doing a really bad job. I don't know any woman who is there just to make up the numbers. They are all highly qualified and professional," she said.

But other business experts have expressed concerns about the EU imposing uniform restrictions on diverse national working cultures.

Kenneth Ahern, a professor of finance from the University of Michigan, doubted whether Britain was ready to make the necessary financial sacrifice to push women on to boards. His own research on Norway, published last year, showed that "the quota led to younger and less experienced boards, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards".

He said: "In Norway, they knew that the value of their companies would drop, but society there cared more about equality than finance. It was a conscious decision.

"For the EU to make such an important moral choice, across such a variety of countries, is a very big ask indeed. I could see there being real resistance to obligatory quotas from countries such as Germany and the UK, which prize the financial output extremely highly."

Mrs Berdal, who was a widely-travelled international lawyer before dedicating -herself full-time to board work, agreed that it could be hard to impose quotas in Britain.

"I think the British culture - both in society in general, and in business - is a bit more conservative, and still a bit more male-dominated than in Scandinavia.

"In the boardroom, if you have only men, they tend to know each other from school, university or the golf club, and decisions are often made outside of the boardroom so you don't have full control and transparency.

"Maybe in the UK you'll have to twist some more arms."