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THE AWARENESS AND RELEVANCE OF GENDER QUOTAS IN ESTONIA
Abstract
The equality between men and women has been an intense debate subject and broadly covered in media in the recent years. Several studies have proved that in many states women are outnumbered by men in leadership positions. Ensuring gender equality is one of the European Unions main objective and necessary component in the Europe 2020 strategy. Today an increasing number of countries are adapting rules and regulations on implementing quotas in corporate governance and state-owned enterprises. The trend is that major companies are moving towards greater gender equality at business level and have announced to use gender quotas, however as gender inequalities still persist in lead-ership positions and the pace of change is slow in the Member States, number of national governments have taken initiative and in some cases legislative measures to encourage or enforce the change. The purpose of this study is to present an overview of the current situation and attitude towards gender quotas and the gender equality in high level man-agement positions in Estonia. The first part of the research analyses the political power composition and ideology during the period 1990 - 2015 in Estonia. The second part of the research analyses Estonian publicly listed and state-owned enterprises for the opin-ions and attitudes prevailing in these companies towards gender quotas and the possible consequences gender quota legislation would have. The results of the study show that although women are currently represented in the active politics in Estonia, the participa-tion percentage is low. The historical and current political power ideology path indicated that implementing gender quotas would not be easy and logical next step for Estonia. The results indicated that currently there are no companies that have any kind of written code of practice or regulations implemented within the company regarding the men and women ratio on high level management positions. However, companies are open to include more women in their corporate governance and support the idea of more board diversity, nevertheless, it is feared that the gender quota implementation would create additional problems and concerns on the corporate governance level rather than additional values to the companies.
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