The European parliament has backed rules that would give women preference for non-executive posts at companies, after plans for a mandatory quota to get women into top jobs were scrapped.
The rules demand that companies give non-executive directorships to women where there is no male candidate who is better qualified, until they reach a target of four in 10 being women.
"The parliament has made the first cracks in the glass ceiling that continues to bar female talent from the top jobs," said EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding, who launched the proposal.
Although the draft law envisages possible fines for firms that ignore selection rules, it has been softened from imposing a quota with a penalty. Nor do the rules help women aiming for top management roles, such as chief executive. They also exempt smaller companies and those that are not listed.
Only about 17% of non-executive board members in the EU's largest companies are women. In Britain, women hold 17.4% percent of directorships, up from 12.5% in 2010; only four CEOs at FTSE 100 companies are women.
If endorsed, the rules will take seven years to come into full force. Countries are now required to sign off on the law but are divided on whether pan-European rules on positive discrimination are necessary.
Britain and Germany have argued against mandatory quotas.
Men dominate boardrooms in the region, and many women who have risen through company ranks resent quotas because they can be seen as suggesting that women have not been promoted on merit.
Only Norway, which is not a member of the bloc, has enforced a 40% quota since 2009, although critics say this has been achieved in part thanks to a small number of women holding non-executive positions in multiple companies.
"It is essential for listed companies to evolve so as to include highly skilled women in their decision-making processes," said Rodi Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou, a member of the parliament who is playing a central role in shaping the law.
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Judging countries solely by GDP per capita is a blunt measure of categorisation. While it might be a necessary criterion, it is certainly not a sufficient one. GCC Human Rights, a campaign group highlighting the plight of migrant workers in the Gulf provides clear reasons for this. It reported: "In GCC countries non-white ethnic groups experience blatant discrimination ... [they] consistently deny immigrant workers the same rights enjoyed by their own citizens."
GCC Human Rights website provides evidence of the most appalling abuse of human rights of non-white migrants, including systematic brutalisation and torture, which was also recently highlighted by the Guardian and Amnesty International. Their mission statement concludes with these words: "Persuade the GCC countries to treat immigrant workers with the respect that is due them, remove all discrimination against them, and acknowledge them as first-class citizens – by doing so, these nations will become great."
What constitutes countries becoming "great" is highly contentious but if and when the GCC countries grant international norms of human rights to the large numbers of migrants within their ranks, then their eligibility to join the ranks of the first world can be considered. Currently though, despite their stellar GDP per capita, they are better considered as part of the third world – and there should be no unease at the derogatory meaning attached in this context.
The term "third world" came to be adopted around the time of the 1955 Asia-Africa conference in Bandung, Indonesia, of "non-aligned" countries – mainly former colonies of Asia and Africa, together with countries of Latin America – that were not part of the advanced west (the first world) or the communist bloc (the second world).
It was therefore an indicator more of a country's geo-political stance rather than its level of development. Notwithstanding the inherent limitations of such a broad brush typology, it nevertheless described the reality of a very large part of the globe. It was also progressive – here were newly independent countries articulating not only an independence of political thinking, but also refusing to be sucked into the dangerous spiral of the cold war driven by two superpowers. While usage of first world and second world was always minimal, third world did garner traction.
Gradually, however, there began to be an unease with the term in that it had connotations of "third class" . In the post-colonial era, it was not considered politically correct to use such terms, especially by those in the former colonial powers. Accordingly, alternatives – not least in academia – such as "developing countries", or "the global south" or even just "the south" began to take preference. Certainly, with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet bloc – and with it the loss of the original rationale for using second world – it seemed that third world would also be made redundant.
This has not been the case. Indeed, the term is still used quite frequently in its economic sense, that is, the level of a country's economic development and standard living as evidenced by GDP per capita. Moreover, many third world countries, especially in east Asia, have forged ahead with development and were accorded a new epithet, newly industrialising countries (Nics). In the development sense, these would now better be described as being part of the second world. They are no longer in the third world, but most are not yet in the first world either. And the old Soviet bloc countries can also fit within this grouping.
In my experience as a longstanding academic, I have found little discomfort in the use of third world by students and academics from the developing world. In the same vein, last year, in an interview with Channel 4 News, Barack Obama's Kenyan half-brother was asked what he thought was the key difference between himself and Obama. He replied quickly that Obama was from the first world and he from the third world. Similarly, in his 2011 book on the modern history of Singapore, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew makes use of the terminology by using the title From Third World to First to highlight the astonishing transformation of a small impoverished country into a modern state with one of the world's highest living standards.
So there is some evidence to suggest that, despite the unease from some quarters, the term third world still has some mileage left when used to refer to countries that are relatively poor with low levels of development. But it is interesting to consider whether the term first world ought to be applied to some countries that have attained very high levels of income per capita. I am thinking of the Gulf states in particular
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