On Tuesday 23 October, Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, submitted her proposal for the introduction of compulsory quotas for women's representation on boards of listed companies within the EU to the European Commission. Since the current development of voluntary involvement of women on boards has shown only minimal results, she demanded the representation of women on boards to increase to 30% by 2015 and to 40% in 2020 in the form of a mandatory European directive. EU Commissioners, however, postponed her plan for further consideration.
European lawyers played the crucial role in the postmonement by informing the European Commission that the law on compulsory representation of women on company boards and the related penalties would be too directive and individual EU member states would be unable to meet the required target. In mid-September, when it was announced that Reding would submit her proposal for the introduction of the quotas, nine EU countries, including the Czech Republic, immediately came with their refusal to support legally binding quotas and stated that they had a sufficient number of votes in the European Parliament to block the potential new directive. In their letter, which was addressed to the European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding, these member states requested the women's representation on boards to be dealt with at the level of individual states, not the whole EU.
Viviane Reding is prepared to a further fight for her proposal. She sent a message via Twitter that she would not give up and also informed that José Manuel Barroso had promised to renegotiate her proposal before the end of November. If her proposal is approved, all 27 member states will have to implement the mandatory quotas to their national legislation by 1 January 2020.
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