The grist of Western gender inequality woes in the job market often centers nowadays on the lack of women holding executive positions and boardroom seats.  A number of European countries have found a seemingly simple solution to the problem:  Just make a law requiring gender-proportionate boardrooms.

This article about Norway has been floating at the top of the New York Times “Female Factor” series for about a week. It explains a law that came into force in Norway in 2004 requiring publicly held companies to have a minimum of 40 percent of their board seats taken by women. Now, a few years after the controversial law took force, the initially reluctant and frustrated corporate higher-ups nationwide have met and exceeded the quota.

There are, of course, lingering complaints and problems with the new boardrooms -- the seats are generally filled by women with less experience than the men they’ve replaced, and by some measures, there have been performance drops since the quota was put in place. But in the 2001-7 period, Oslo’s primary stock index showed annual gains of more than 14 percent. Still, it's almost impossible to judge the impact of a shifting boardroom just a few years after the law was created.

In spite of inconclusive results as to how a gender-balanced boardroom affects corporate performance, other European countries are jumping in line to follow Norway’s lead. Spain passed a “Law of Equality” in 2007, requiring political parties to run female candidates in 40 percent of contested seats and allowing 15 days of paternity leave to new fathers. Belgium, Britain, Germany and Sweden are thinking about similar laws, and the French government announced this week that all companies listed on the Paris stock exchange have until 2015 to make their boardrooms perfectly gender-balanced.