Where are the women? Company management, a masculine bastion that still holds out

They are occupying more and more key positions, but continue to stumble on the bottom rung. Despite the increased presence of women on boards of directors, the corporate world is still largely run by men.

“The corporate world was built to accommodate the needs of men,” Tara Cemlyn-Jones, head of the British organisation 25×25, which is dedicated to promoting parity in companies, told AFP.

“The only way to change things is to make structures fairer for women,” argues the former investment banker.

The figures are indisputable. According to a Deloitte report on nearly 10,500 companies worldwide, 19.7% of board members in 2021 were women, compared with… 5% of chief executives.

In the United States, women accounted for around 24% of board members, but less than 6% of CEOs. The pattern is similar in the UK (around 30% of board seats, 6% of CEOs). France, meanwhile, has introduced the Copé-Zimmermann law, which since 2011 has imposed a minimum quota of 40% women on boards of directors. A way of getting a foot in the door.

“This will pay off in the long term,” says Diane Segalen, President of the recruitment consultancy Segalen + Associés.

According to Deloitte, by 2021, 43.2% of board directors in France were women. Yet only three women are currently at the head of a company in the Paris Bourse’s flagship CAC 40 index (Catherine MacGregor at Engie, Christel Heydemann at Orange and Estelle Brachlianoff at Veolia).

It has to be said that the business world has long been a male bastion. The first woman to chair the influential French Association of Private Enterprises (Afep), Patricia Barbizet, a regular on the boards of directors of the CAC 40, recalled in 2021 that she “entered a business school the first year that girls were admitted.”

No country stands out for its professional equality. In Germany, only Belén Garijo, for the Merck laboratory, heads a company in the DAX, the leading index on the Frankfurt stock exchange.

In Spain, the vast majority of companies in the Ibex 35, the Iberian equivalent of the CAC 40, are headed by men, with the exception of Inditex (owner of Zara) and Santander, Spain’s leading bank, which are headed by Marta Ortega and Ana Botin respectively.

Italy, meanwhile, is hardly better off, and last year Giuseppina di Foggia, CEO of energy distributor Terna, became the first woman to head a major public group in the country.

Environment

After all, it is one thing to have women on boards of directors, but they also need to occupy key positions on the executive committee, which is a prerequisite for senior management.

Ariane Bucaille, a partner at Deloitte, believes that “quotas are a formidable accelerator,” but “if we are seeing a rise in the number of women on executive committees, it is more in functions such as human resources and marketing,” she analyses.

The not-for-profit organisation 25×25 recently published a report on the subject, which comes to more or less the same conclusions. Certain senior management positions, such as finance director, are a royal road to general management, but the proportion of women occupying them “remains remarkably low,” it concludes.

To remedy this, France, a forerunner in this field, has adopted the Rixain law, which sets a target of at least 30% women in executive bodies from 2026, rising to 40% by 2029.

This law “will encourage some progress. But it’s bound to be slow going”, says Ms Bucaille: “We must not relax our efforts, because (…) we’re a long way from achieving our goal”.

Quotas or no quotas, for Tara Cemlyn-Jones, the first priority is to transform the environment. And for that, investors have a role to play.

“Questions should be asked about the way investment decisions are made. How can it be acceptable for fund managers to say: ‘Don’t worry about the gender of the manager’? We don’t want to hear that,” urges Tara Cemlyn-Jones.

However, headhunter Diane Segalen is confident: “I believe that this will happen with the next generation, which started in the 2000s, and which has had older women and inspiring role models,” she says.