Multinational companies are under increasing legal and social pressure to increase their representation of women in their work force. These pressures come, most recently, from Europe, which has passed a spate of laws requiring publicly traded companies to adopt quotas mandating a minimum percentage of women on their boards.
The most recent example is Germany, which as of March 2015 requires boards of companies listed on the German stock exchange to be made up of at least 30 percent women. Companies that fail to meet this fixed requirement risk the nullification of their existing boards.1