Bekaert changes gender of its board

Together with their good results, Bekaert announced some rather surprising news this week. Starting from May, four out of the six independent board members, will be women. The current members, four men and one woman, will be replaced by four new women and two men.

The new board members are the British Celia Baxter (Ford, KPMG, Tate & Lyle, Bunzl), the Belgian Christophe Jacobs van Merlen (Bain Capital), the German Pamela Knapp (Deutsche Bank, Siemens), the German Martina Merz (Chassis Brakes, Robert Bosch) en the Belgians Emilie van de Walle de Ghelcke en Henri-Jean Velge. With these new members, four of the independent directors will be women. Bekaert says that the new choices are a consequence of a thorough succession planning, aiming at a broad international, and professional representation.

It is a big change of the company because a few months ago, at the end of 2015, De Standaard published a study done by Standard Ethics, where they ranked the BEL20 companies according to the number of women in the board. Standard Ethics is the first independent European Sustainability rating agency. They assign Solicited Sustainability Ratings (SSR) to companies, sovereign issuers and green bonds. At that time, Bekaert was far below in the list, with only a representation of 14,29 % of women in the board. AB Inbev and Colruyt had the same percentage of women. The only company that that did worse was Ackermans & Van Haaren (11, 11% of women).

The three companies that had the most women in their board were Engie (57,89% of women), Proximus (50 %) and Delta Lloyd (40%). Now Bekaert will be definitely in the top three of the BEL20 regarding gender diversity of the board. The table below shows the percentage of gender composition in the twenty largest Belgian companies.

Standard Ethics made a comparison between the largest companies in France, Germany, Belgium and Italy. Belgium performs both extremely well and extremely poor. Our country has the first place (Engie) in the top 10 companies regarding gender diversification, but is also in the bottom 10 companies (Ackermans & Van Haaren).

It is clear that there are still large differences between companies, even in the BEL20. But, Bekaert’s announcement this week already made a big change. They will shift from being one of the bottom BEL20 companies in board diversification, to being one of the top companies in the list. Who knows, maybe Colruyt, AB Inbev and Ackermans & Van Haaren will follow this example, and Belgium will become the leader in gender diversification at board level!