|
|
|
|
|
| LATEST
NEWS |
06th
February 2010 / Times of India / Bangalore Edition
|
|
 Women in higher management still a rarity: survey
NOT A COMMON SIGHT
New Delhi: Top business honchos like Indra Nooyi, Anu Agha and Shikha Sharma may have broken the glass ceiling to command their own boardrooms but these are mere aberrations rather than the norm. A new global survey reveals that women enter the workforce in large numbers but over time steadily “vaporise” from the higher echelons of organizational hierarchy.
Sample this: In 2009, only 3% of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO while in Europe, women constitute just 12% of the boards of directors of FTSE 100 companies — 25% of these companies still have all male boards.
The global survey conducted by business consulting firm Bain and Company interviewed 1,834 people and found a lingering gender perception gap with lack of management commitment and focus keeping women out of leadership positions.
Research by the firm showed that organizations lost talent, with a disproportionate number of women employees at middle and senior levels leaving their jobs. “Even a 5% difference in attrition yields nearly two times the number of men than women after 10 years. A 5% decrease in female retention, after 10 years, results in the equivalent of wiping out the benefits of increasing female recruitment from 30% to 50%,” the report said.
“Achieving gender parity in the workplace is possible if business leaders take a systematic and customised approach to finding out what derails women along the way at their organizations,” Orit Gadiesh, Bain chairman and coauthor of the study, said. The study showed that senior management in 75% of companies had not made gender parity a stated and visible priority, while 80% of firms hade not committed adequate funding or resources to the initiatives.
Other findings showed that while 66% of men reported that they believed women shared equal opportunity to be promoted to leadership and governance positions, less than a third of women felt the same.
Also, while a majority of responders supported the idea of gender parity in the workplace, it was the women who voted strongly in favour of strategic commitment. More than 80% of women agreed or strongly agreed while only 48% men felt that achieving gender parity should be a critical business imperative for their organisations.
Incidentally, while both men (87%) and women (91%) voted in large numbers in favour of the belief that either sex could be a primary breadwinner, when it came to making career sacrifices, however, men and women reacted differently. While 59% of women agreed they would sacrifice their career for the sake of the household, a slightly lower 53% of men felt the same way.
|
|
|
