Marieke, The Netherlands
Marieke, a legal, strategy and finance Dutch executive, hadn’t considered board membership until she got a phone call twelve years ago. A headhunter asked her if she would be interested in joining a workers’ council, a common path to board work in the Netherlands. At the same time, a close friend began lobbying for her, as well as other women, to join more boards. With an overabundance of energy for taking on new challenges, Marieke found herself sitting on a museum’s audit committee alongside the Audit Chair of Heineken. In her first board meeting ever, Marieke realized that there were many unwritten rules.