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page 137 chapter III
company review its recruitment policy and exploit the
potential offered by women. If nothing changes, we'll
have to introduce a quota rule.”
Diversity: not always easy to put into practice
Diversity means more than just a balanced ratio of
women and men. So, Klaus Prömpers also addressed
the subject of ethnic diversity: “How can we achieve
more international staffing of management boards,
supervisory boards or managerial positions?” One obstacle,
said Klaus-Peter Müller, was that many foreigners
found Germany’s rights of codetermination and
employee representation strange. However, language
barriers were a more serious problem: “For instance,
everything would have to be interpreted at meetings,
and all room documents and other texts translated.
Many companies cannot afford the expense that
would involve.”
A Congress participant representing the German Managers’
Confederation drew attention to a further aspect
of diversity: in the spirit of codetermination and
diversity, all employee groups should be represented
on supervisory boards. “But the supervisory boards of
European Companies (SEs), for example, are getting
smaller. According to the new regulations, the trade
unions retain a relatively large number of seats, but
the group of executive employees is left out, meaning
there is less diversity.” Klaus-Peter Müller was essentially
in favour of reducing the size of supervisory boards:
“20 people, or sometimes even more, are too many. I
consider a supervisory board with 12 to 16 members to
be appropriate for large companies. The number of
trade union representatives could be discussed, but ex-