8.3.2.3 Diversity

Diversity must be considered in the outline profile of the supervisory board and diversity objectives must be specified, according to the DCGC. If the company does not meet its own diversity objective, it must make an estimation of the time needed to reach that objective. Diversity in this case involves gender, age, expertise, social background and nationality.

Furthermore, companies that fall within the ambit of the structure regime must have at least thirty per cent men and thirty per cent women on their supervisory board. If the company fails to meet these legal requirements, it must explain why it does not have a balanced gender distribution, how it has tried to achieve this equal gender distribution and how it will try to achieve this equal gender distribution in the future. The diversity in this case focuses solely on gender diversity, which is a rather narrow approach to diversity in this law. Also, imposing this obligation only on companies that fall within the ambit of the structure regime is a missed opportunity. This limits the scope of the requirements and many companies are not taken into consideration, which must be regretted. So, diversity in the Civil Code is a strong element of the composition/ structure building block of independence, but is unnecessarily limited to gender and companies that fall within the ambit of the structure regime.