Spain: national securities supervisory authority calls for greater gender parity on company management boards

Spain’s National Securities Market Commission (CMNV) in charge of supervising Spain’s stock markets wants listed companies to have at least 40% female representation on their boards of directors. This is just one of new measures being introduced in the overhauled good governance code that has to be approved by the relevant companies within the next few months. Although the new rules are not binding they do set out a common agreed framework and any non-compliant companies will have to report the reasons for this in their annual reports. The CMNV is not seeking to foist requirements on businesses, instead it is looking to create momentum towards more gender parity by way of augmenting the text that is currently in force. Whether or not significant progress is made towards the goal remains to be seen, not least since the previous text’s targets were far from being reached. Signed in 2015 the previous text had sought 30% female representation on company boards by the end of 2020, and as things stand the reality is very far from the mark. At the end of 2018 the proportion of females on listed company management boards stood at 20.3% and this rose to 23.9% for companies quoted on Madrid’s Index 35. The CMNV suggests the problem doesn’t necessarily originate at board level, but rather that it is an issue of females accessing positions of responsibility within companies. Women make up only a tiny minority of senior positions: only 4.9% of female advisors belong to management teams and barely 16% of females hold senior management positions.