E.U. Considers Quotas for Women in Boardrooms BRUSSELS - Frustrated that her previous efforts to get more women into the top echelons of European business have not yielded stronger results, Viviane Reding, the senior justice official in the European Union, was to announce a new effort Monday that could result in legislation requiring that women occupy up to 60 percent of the seats on corporate boards. France and other countries with legally binding quotas have made the most progress in placing women in top business positions, Ms. Reding said during an interview Friday in advance of her announcement. E.U.-wide rules were now needed, she said. "Personally, I don't like quotas," Ms. Reding said. But I like what the quotas do. Quotas open the way to equality and they break through the glass ceiling. Countries that have quotas "bring the results," she said. Ms. Reding has long campaigned for major changes in European boardrooms and had given industry "a last chance" to improve its record on placing women in top management. Having now concluded that self-regulation has failed, Ms. Reding has set her sights on legislation that could, if enacted, drastically speed up a revolution in the position of women in the workplace that began many decades ago but has so far failed to deliver genuine equality in many areas of business. In the announcement to be made Monday, Ms. Reding will call for a new round of consultations with governments, trade unions, companies and civil groups. The move comes a year after she called on companies to take voluntary steps to increase the representation of women on boards to 30 percent by 2015 and to 40 percent by 2020, by replacing departing male directors. In the end, only 24 companies signed up to that voluntary measure - "a disappointment," she said. Yet that poor showing has handed Ms. Reding - who has gained stature by successfully lowering the cost of cellphone calls and confronting government leaders over the mistreatment of minority groups - an opportunity to prepare the ground for more sweeping proposals. Ms. Reding said that the severe economic downturn in Europe that has pressured companies to focus on their bottom lines was not responsible for the failure of her voluntary initiative. "It is really a question of society," she said. As of January, only 3.2 percent of the presidents and chairmen of large companies in the European Union were women, and women occupied only 13.7 percent of the seats on the boards of large companies, according to a report by her department of the European Commission to be issued on Monday. Ms. Reding said she had the support of many members of the European Parliament, which had already backed the need for legislation if companies failed to make sufficient progress through self-regulation. And on Monday she will claim popular support from citizens, with a new poll showing that 75 percent of respondents favored legislation to balance gender representation on company boards. TNS Opinion & Social conducted the poll for the commission from Sept. 3 to Sept. 11, 2011, through phone and face-to-face interviews with 26,856 people. Ms. Reding said France, which at the beginning of last year adopted quotas requiring that women hold 20 percent of board positions by 2014, and 40 percent by 2017, had been responsible for almost half of the 1.9-percentage-point increase in women on boards in Europe from October 2010 to January 2012. That growth far outpaced a rise of 0.6 percentage point over the past decade. Under the French law, elections of board members among noncompliant companies in the country are nullified. Similar legislative initiatives are under way in Belgium and other E.U. countries. In Italy, one-third of a company's board must be women by 2015 or the business will face fines of up to €1 million, or $1.3 million, and the nullification of board elections. The Netherlands and Spain have legal recommendations, but no sanctions for laggards. Ms. Reding said that the consultations, beginning Monday and ending on May 28, would determine the proportion of women that should be on boards under any E.U.-wide legislation; whether quotas should apply to state-owned companies as well as publicly listed ones; whether both executive and nonexecutive boards should be covered by the rules; and what sanctions should apply to companies that do not meet the objectives, and if there are circumstances where exceptions are necessary.