Listed firms face two-year deadline to ensure women hold 40 per cent of board seats.

The 500 companies listed on Norway's stock exchange may be shut down unless they install women on their boards over the next two years in a radical initiative imposed by a government determined to help women break through the "glass ceiling".

After a week in which the Equal Opportunities Commission in Britain has warned that it would take 40 years for women to break into the ranks of the FTSE 100 in the same way as men, Norwegian companies face a two-year deadline to ensure that women hold 40 per cent of the seats of each company listed on the Oslo bourse. New companies have to comply now with the rules and the government is considering extending the law to family-owned companies as well.

The requirement came into effect at the start of this year after companies were given two years to embrace the demands voluntarily following the passing of the law in 2003. State-owned companies are already obliged to comply and now have 45 per cent female representation on their boards.

The failure of companies to act - about half of the companies on the stock market are estimated to have no women on their boards - has prompted the Norwegian equality minister, Karita Bekkemellem, to take the draconian step of threatening firms with closure.

"From January 1st, 2006, I want to put in place a system of sanctions that will allow the closure of firms," she said.

"I do not want to wait another 20 or 30 years for men with enough intelligence to finally appoint women.

"More than half of the people who have a business education today are women. It is wrong for companies not to use them. They should be represented."

It is a cry that is familiar to organisations such as Britain's Equal Opportunities Commission, which is trying to promote the elevation of women to boardrooms in Britain. The commission's report last week, Sex and Power, found that women make up only 11 per cent of directors in FTSE 100 companies and painted a bleak picture for the prospects of much improvement.

The British government tried to tackle the problem after a report into boardroom behaviour by the City grandee Sir Derek Higgs highlighted the "pale male" phenomenon in companies. There was an attempt to draw up a list of 100 women who might be candidates for boards, though Laura D'Andrea Tyson, an academic and former adviser to president Clinton who was charged with finding candidates, decided in the end that such a list was unnecessary.

Norway's imposition of quotas seems unlikely to be embraced by Britain. The few women who have reached senior roles in British firms appear to oppose a target system. Deanna Oppenheimer, the American banker recently appointed to run Barclays' branch network, says: "In my experience, mixed teams, mixed by gender, ethnic background, by age and experience, perform better than homogeneous teams."

Banking is one area of British business where women are in senior roles. Oppenheimer is the second American woman named to run a British branch network. Terri Dial has joined the board of Lloyds TSB to run its UK retail operation and is one of two women holding executive positions on the Lloyds board, where Helen Weir is finance director.

Weir wonders whether her job makes it easier for women to achieve a senior role. However, she is a reluctant role model for women eager to progress in business, partly because of the work-life sacrifices required.

"The trade-offs I make won't necessarily work for everyone else," she says, adding that 90 per cent of her time is divided between work and her three children, with the remaining 10 per cent fought over between her husband, friends and herself.

Oppenheimer acts as a mentor for men and women and believes women need to be "very articulate, to form points well" and should work in environments that "value performance" if they want to get on.

In Norway, women have been very successful in reaching top positions outside business. In politics, for instance, a third of the country's MPs are women and nine of the 19 cabinet ministers are women. In Britain, 20 per cent of MPs are women and the Equal Opportunities Commission has warned that it could take another 40 elections for equality with men to be reached.

The near-equality of Norwegian women in politics might explain the determination to tackle under-representation in business, where 16 per cent of company directors are women. The law being implemented was the brainchild of the former businessman Ansgar Gabrielsen, a trade and industry minister in the former government.

"The law was not about getting equality between the sexes; it was about the fact that diversity is a value in itself, that it creates wealth. From my time in the business world, I saw how board members were picked - they come from the same small circle of people. They go hunting and fishing together, they are buddies," he said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Norwegian business community is opposed to the government's attempts to interrupt the status quo. The Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) has a database of 400 women and claims that a quarter of them have been offered management or board positions.

Sigrun Vaageng, of the NHO, said: "The punishment is completely disproportionate . . . It is far too harsh to close a company just because it lacks one woman."

She doubts whether the government will carry out its threat.

"It is science fiction to think that the government is going to shut down a company that employs thousands of people over this," she said.

Some companies are waiting to see if the government will use the sanctions, according to Marit Hoel, head of the Centre for Corporate Diversity. But Bekkemellem, the equality minister, seems convinced that firms will not risk it. "Are there companies that will risk closure just because they lack one woman? They have another two years to fix the situation," she warns. - (Guardian service)