Sister act | 26 February 2011

Josef Ackermann is something of a rarity in big business these days. Speculating last month on the possibility of a woman one day joining his board, the Deutsche Bank chief executive remarked that she might make it ‘more colourful and prettier’. Despite howls of outrage from the sisterhood — or the Schwesternschaft, as they are somewhat scarily called in Germany — what was interesting about the banker’s casual sexism was how odd it sounded rather than how ordinary. Most CEOs these days would rather boast about how their factories pumped millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere than make any remark that could be construed as disparaging to women.

What until recently seemed the last bastion of male power, the boardroom, has in the last few years started to fall to feminism. Across Europe, laws and quotas are demanding that female directors are appointed as often as male ones.