In a statement marking International Women’s Day, HANFA said that its corporate governance code shows that Croatia and the EU are still far from gender equality on the management and supervisory boards of listed companies.
According to HANFA, there has been a considerable change in the gender structure of the supervisory boards of companies listed on the Zagreb Stock Exchange over the last decade, with the share of women increasing from 18% in 2010 to 35% in 2019. However, their share again declined in 2020 to 22% due to the delisting of some of the companies.
At the same time, the gender structure of management boards did not change considerably, ranging between 12 and 17%. Last year, 16% of management board members were women.
In recent decades, efforts have been made at EU level to increase the presence of women on companies’ management and supervisory boards, mostly through adoption of different recommendations and by encouraging companies to adopt their own rules to achieve a balance in the gender structure of management and supervisory boards.
HANFA joined those efforts in October 2019 by adopting a new corporate governance code which provides that every five years the supervisory board of a company must define a target share of women on the management and supervisory boards, which must be achieved during the next five-year period. The code does not specify the percentage, but requires companies to set it by themselves in their annual report.
HANFA Governing Council chairman Ante Žigman noted that equality between men and women was one of the fundamental values of the European Union, but that despite efforts to achieve 40% female representation by 2020, the data was still unsatisfactory.
