The Danish drug group Novo Nordisk is seemingly ready to take the next step to ensure gender diversity in the company in an effort to bring a larger number of female executives into management teams.

Executive management is getting actively involved in the process and the company wants to find out why there seems to be so few qualified women for the posts, Annelise Goldstein, vice president, Diversity and Inclusion, Novo Nordisk, tells Medwatch.

“We will launch a new strategy – a 2015-2020 strategy – and have discussed some principles with a view to launching the strategy in the beginning of 2015. The strategy will be finally decided upon by our executive management in November and then it will go to the Board of directors in December this year. The principle is that we will continue our focus and most likely increase our ambition level,” she says.

Vast differences

The comments follow an article by Medwatch last week that focused on a five-year plan in Novo Nordisk, running from 2009-2014, meant to ensure that all of the group’s 33 management teams included at least one member of each gender by the end of this year.

 Female executives abound in Novo’s management halls 

And that plan is set to be replaced by a new one in 2015.

Does that mean a larger number of females in each team?

“Probably we will go to something on more of a percentage basis because the sizes of the management teams differ.”

Have you seen an interest in this from the women in the organization or is it hard to actually fulfill ambitions?

“I’ve been working with it since 2010 and I have seen an increasing interest in the diversity topic. When we first started talking about diversity, there was more skepticism, but now people don’t ask why they ask how we can work with this, how we can do it better, so that has been a shift. It has been integrated into annual review processes of our talent pool.”

Not enough female seniors

In the debate about the lack of women in board rooms the argument can be heard that it is difficult to find female executives that are interested in serving on boards.

Is that the case here?

“I think, not so much that it’s hard to find women who want to. I think sometimes we don’t have women in the pipeline who are senior enough; we have less of a population to draw from. So our focus in this past year has really been on identifying those next generation talents and to take an active role in developing them, and our executive management has committed to taking a more active role, both at the executive level and at the senior vice president level, to naming the people and to commit to an active approach to developing them this past year.”

Why do you think this pipeline of talent is a little thin?

“That’s the million-dollar question and I think there are multiple reasons. Some areas of our business, like production or finance, are classically male areas and a number of women go on maternity leave in their thirties, which is sometimes the critical talent years during which people are appointed to their first managerial positions. Some may choose not to pursue that career track and we should perhaps also have a broader view of who we see as potential talents. We look at all this; there is not one single answer.”

Do you also think it’s a tradition that men are picking men?

“That’s what the research shows; that people tend to choose others that look like themselves.”

Will increased ambitions for representation of women in upper management teams also include the executive management and the Board of directors?

“Novo Nordisk is an ambitious company, in this area as well. As it is now, our updated strategy in 2015 will likely have a more ambitious approach.”

- translated by Martin Havtorn Petersen

Want to receive the latest news from Medwatch straight in your e-mail inbox? Sign up for our free english newsletter below.