Balanced Advice? Appointments to Advisory Boards and Gender Quota's in the European Union

Advisory councils and boards play an important role in countries with corporatistic decision-making practices. Appointments to these boards are often controlled by political actors but regulated in a bureaucratic framework. Feminist movements identified these decision-making bodies as both crucial gatekeepers and easily malleable venues for a quick fix of gender balance. Given that many of the bodies are appointed by the state, boards and public committees seemed to offer the opportunity to quickly change the gender balance in decision-making, even as electoral sectors were changing slowly. Countries such as Belgium and Norway adapted legal gender composition rules for appointed bodies by 2005.  Later quota’s in electoral politics became more widespread. Today many European countries have also started proceedings to implement gender quota’s in advisory bodies and corporate business boards with state participation. To what extent has the increasing integration of Europe led to adaption of gender regulations of appointed boards in EU member states? How does this interact with political appointment processes? What are the results and how does the bureaucratic capacity of the state interact with implementation of gender-balance rules? This paper will report on comparative data and measures in the 27 European Union countries.  Who has adopted quota for these bodies, and what are the arguments? How do gender equality considerations relate to debates about de-politicization of appointments? Further the paper will review available results on the composition of boards with a view to identifying potential pitfalls for adaption in other political and cultural contexts.