Urban Lab 2 | MAY 2022

With their decisions, supervisory board members are jointly responsible for the direction their companies take and how they advance their personnel and organizational development. Many members of supervisory boards come to seats on supervisory boards through their membership in local councils or trade unions. Supervisory board members who take on supervisory board positions through their professional careers in a narrowly technical sense have only been able to give limited thought in advance to their opportunities to pursue equality policy objectives in their offices. As a result, forward-looking supervisory board members often lack not the will, but rather the knowledge and concrete ideas to advance strategies and measures for gender equality in their companies. In this lab, following a roundtable discussion with some active supervisory board members about their experiences on this important and at the same time sensitive topic of equality, we will present a concrete project for implementing equality policy goals in supervisory board work. The project was developed as part of the implementation of the EU Charter for Equality between Women and Men at the municipal level in Mannheim.

Based on the "GleichZiehen" project, the possibility of creating a (digital?) platform for active supervisory board members where they can (anonymously?) talk to each other and exchange ideas is discussed in order to bring the topic of equality more into focus in supervisory board work.