More Women Now Serve on Executive Boards of Portuguese Companies

By: GWL Team | Monday, 1 December 2025

Since 2017, there has been over a two-fold increase in the number of women serving as executives across Portugal
Despite this progress, approximately one-third of all executives are still women (17.4%)

Women now hold more than double the executive board positions available to them in Portuguese listed companies since the introduction of gender quotas for board positions in 2017.

However, despite this increase, the number of women occupying executive and senior management positions within Portuguese companies still remains quite low, representing approximately one-third (or about 17.4%) of all executive positions available to them in Portugal.

According to Innovators Forum'25 and Sonae's findings, the increases attributable to gender quota policy legislation resulted in an increase of 136 percent in female representation on executive boards of listed companies from January 2017 to December 2025, growing from a level of only 15.5 percent female representation to 36.6 percent female representation on executive boards by December 2025.

These findings were shared at a recent diversity impact event that addressed the issue of how diversity can help businesses compete in today's global economy; this event took place at the Leixões Port Cruise Terminal.

According to data compiled from recent analysis, the increase in the numbers of females serving on boards across the 30 European Nations was greatest for Portugal.

Portugal was ranked fifth in the total change, with a net increase of 117 percent between 2012 and 2013, just behind Romania (2,000 percent) and Greece (1,900 percent). This success led to an increase in Portugal's ranking for total directors of public organisations from 20th place to 15th place.

Of particular note, although Portugal has a higher percentage of female directors than the EU average of 35 percent, it still performs below the countries with the highest representation of females on boards, which are France (46.9 percent), Iceland (45.7 percent), Italy (44.4 percent), Denmark (44.3 percent) and the UK (44.3 percent).