Female board representation dips at Germany's largest firms

Gender equality slipped back last year in the executive suites of Germany's 90 largest companies listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange, according to a new study.

The proportion of women on the management boards of companies listed on Germany's DAX and MDAX indices edged lower in 2025, reversing a long-standing upward trend, executive search firm Russell Reynolds said.

Women currently account for 25.5% of board members at DAX-listed companies, down 0.2 percentage points from a year earlier, the study found.

Only four DAX groups – Beiersdorf, Merck, MTU and Siemens Healthineers – had women accounting for more than half of their board members. At the other end of the table, Porsche and Brenntag had no female board members at all.

In the mid-cap MDAX index, the share of women in top executive roles fell by 0.4% to 19.5%, bringing to an end a 10-year period in which women had joined the boards of large listed companies in steadily rising numbers, Russell Reynolds said.

The study also found that female executives are disproportionately likely to be placed in human resources roles, rather than leading operational business units.

In a comparison of nine European countries, Germany and Sweden were the only two where the position of female top managers deteriorated, according to the analysis.

Norway ranked highest, with women accounting for well over a third of executive board members. Germany's DAX ranked sixth for female representation, while the MDAX placed second from the bottom, ahead of Italy.

The international comparison, the balance of power on executive boards and women's shorter tenures show that "structural gender equality has yet to be achieved in German corporate leadership," study author Jens-Thomas Pietralla said.