“The proof is in the pudding: regulatory pressure works,” Viviane Reding, the E.U. justice commissioner, said in a statement to the International Herald Tribune on the eve of her participation in a panel on the role of women in economic decision-making at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Ms. Reding is leading a campaign for legally binding measures to promote gender equality in the top ranks of the European business world. But she has run into vigorous opposition from some E.U. governments, including Britain’s, that prefer that such measures be voluntary.

Ms. Reding had to abandon a proposal in November for legislation that called for punishing companies whose supervisory boards had fewer than 40 percent women. Ms. Reding then proposed that sanctions apply only in cases where companies do not have 40 percent of women on their supervisory boards and fail to enact selection procedures giving priority to a qualified female candidate.

Her appearance at Davos should give her another opportunity to make the case that her amended proposal, which must be approved by the European Parliament and by E.U. governments, should be adopted across Europe.

Belgium, France and Italy, among others, recently adopted legislation encouraging the naming of women to corporate boards and “are starting to show progress,” she told the I.H.T. The evidence “clearly demonstrates that time-limited regulatory intervention can make all the difference,” she said.

In Italy, which adopted a law in 2011 requiring listed and state-owned companies to have women in a third of management and supervisory-board positions by 2015, there was an increase of 4.9 percentage points between January and October last year in the number of women on the boards of listed companies. Even so, Italy remains below the European average, with only 11 percent of those seats occupied by women.

Ms. Reding lauded France for becoming the first E.U. member state last year to have more than one woman on the top-level board of all of its largest listed companies, including major banks like Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas. She said women now represented a quarter of the membership of nonexecutive boards on the CAC 40, an index of leading French stocks.

France introduced its law last year requiring executive and nonexecutive boards to have 20 percent women by 2014 and 40 percent women by 2017. Boards that do not include enough women would have their votes annulled.

Women still lagged far behind men and occupied only 15.8 percent of seats on the executive and nonexecutive boards of publicly listed companies across the Union as of October 2012, according to figures to be released on Friday by the European Commission. But that represented a gain of 2.2 percentage points from a year earlier.

The gain was also the highest yearly rise since 2003, when the European Commission began monitoring gender balance on corporate boards, according to Ms. Reding.

“Companies are finally starting to understand that if they want to remain competitive in an aging society they cannot afford to ignore female talent,” said Ms. Reding, who added that 60 percent of graduates from universities in the Union’s 27 member states last year were women.

Nearly all E.U. countries recorded an increase in women’s membership on the executive and nonexecutive boards of publicly listed companies between January and October last year, the commission said. The exceptions were Poland and Ireland, where the numbers held steady at 12 percent and 9 percent, and Bulgaria, where the figure dropped four percentage points to 12 percent, according to the commission.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/global/measures-promoting-women-in-business-are-working-reding-says.html?partner=rss&emc=rss