In recent years, an increasing awareness of competence-based appointments to supervisory boards has also led to an increased ratio of female supervisory board members on the shareholder side. Whereas in the past a "Christian" often appointed many well-known "Christians" from the network to the board, who then jointly recruited a "Thomas" for the CEO position, the recruitment for supervisory boards has now become more professional and transparent overall: Supervisory board members no longer come primarily from the personal network of the owners or chairpersons; instead, fortunately, competence profiles are drawn up, which serve as baseline for a targeted search with external partners.
In the meantime, almost one third of supervisory board members on the shareholder side are women.
Even though this is already a pleasing development, male representatives are found almost without exception, especially in the decisive appointment committees. As a result, the female CEO representation in listed companies in Germany is still far from a healthy gender diversity quota.
Only if external recruitment partner, owners and the decisive appointment committees jointly leave the path of presumably safe candidate profiles and adopt an open-minded approach, will the quota of female members of supervisory boards also increase in the appointment committees, followed by the quota in the Executive Boards. In every recruitment process, the goal should be to request benchmark profiles under diversity criteria and to evaluate them for a possible fit.