EU proposals to introduce mandatory quotas for women on boards would present significant difficulties for boardroom recruitment, headhunters have warned a House of Lords Committee.

Giving evidence at the EU sub committee session Michael Reyner, partner at executive search firm MWM Consulting, said the focus of headhunters and their clients is to provide the most effective boards possible.

Appointing more diverse boards is one of the ways of doing this “but obviously it isn’t the overriding objective,” he said.

“Boards are trying to put together the right mix of skills, experience and personalities to add effective value,” Reyner explained.

“The fear we have with quotas is that if they are set at the wrong level or set with too short a timeframe that they’ll lead to a search for gender diversity as the overriding objective, which if done too bluntly could lead to appointments being made for the wrong reasons and lead to less effective boards.”

He said that the Davies Report’s voluntary targets of 25 per cent by 2015 were the right level to make people focus on gender diversity, but not so much that it forced them to compromise the effectiveness of the boards.

This is lower than the EU proposed targets of 30 per cent of boards to be female by 2015, rising to 40 per cent by 2020.

Will Dawkins, head of board services at headhunters Spencer Stuart, said: “If you look at the countries that have applied quotas, such as Norway, France and Spain, Norway has been running them for seven years and they have helped drive the number up.

"However, if you look at countries that don’t apply them such as the UK, Germany, Sweden and Poland, you have a pretty much similar rise in female board representation. In the quota countries there are practical difficulties that we should worry about if we ever applied quotas here.”

Dawkins said that although Norway met its 40 per cent goal reasonably quickly, it did that in part by depleting the pipeline of executive women who are suitable to take up non-executive roles.

The result of this was that a generation of women retired from executive life earlier than they would otherwise have done, resulting in a shortage in that generation. Headhunters in Norway are now trying to headhunt female non-execs back into executive life “which is creating a bit of a headache,” he added.

“We are all bound by one objective here, to raise female representation on boards and also raise quality at the same time. I think it needs to be done with a certain amount of sensitivity to local market conditions.”

However, Kate Grussing, founder and managing director of diverse talent firm Sapphire Partners, said: Supply is not the problem; Cranfield research shows there are over 2,500 women who are board ready. We do overstate some of the challenges of quotas. Norway is roughly the size of Cornwall, and I think the UK has a far greater critical mass of talented women.”

Grussing added: “It was Viviane Reding [the EU Justice commissioner] who said she ‘may not like quotas per se but she likes their results’. There’s been a lot of research about what a high proportion of women are opposed to quotas, but I think there’s very little valid research that can be pointed to on that subject.”