The Future Is Female Bosses

There is room for improvement when it comes to women being represented in management. Here is what we can do to challenge the status quo

- Zurien Onn

Just after International Women’s Day on March 2019, several statistics on gender equality were published in Europe, including reports by the European University Association (EUA), the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). One common trend stood out: All the reports found that women were still under-represented in management positions globally.

The EUA looked at female university leaders in Europe and found that only 14 per cent of university rectors across 46 countries with EUA members were female. The number has since increased by 36 per cent since 2014, but it still falls short. In fact, at the time of the survey, 22 of the countries researched did not have any female rectors at all.

Meanwhile, the Eurostat research found that only one out of three who held a managerial position in the European Union was female, and this statistic has more or less remained the same since 2012.

Interestingly, Latvia had the highest percentage of women managers, the only member state with women as the majority in this position, at 56 per cent. Countries with the lowest numbers of female managers were Luxembourg at 15 per cent and Cyprus at 23 per cent while the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands were at 29 per cent.

Similarly, the JRC found that women were also under-represented in politics across Europe, even as it was also found that in those countries that had higher female representation, the quality of governance was increased.

Nearer home in Asia, the International Labour Organisation reported that top management jobs were occupied by women in only one in three cases.

According to The 2017 Hays Asia Salary Guide, published by specialist recruitment firm Hays, women held 31 per cent of management roles in Asia – a slight increase from the previous year’s 29 per cent.