Nowadays, the women’s presence in companies is a fact. The female presence percentage into boards of directors of IBEX 35 companies has increased almost ten points in last six years, reaching a similar figures to European average. However, there is a long way to achieve the 40% goal in boards of directors, established in the Spanish Equality Act of 2007.
Women´s presence is not the same in all sectors. Sectors such as engineering, logistics, construction, industry and transports have lower female presence.
On the opposite side, there are positions related to human resources, finance, pharma, marketing and sales, where women have a higher presence management positions and have a more prominent role. Although in this cases, the highest executive positions continue being men.
Nonetheless, exist a positive point in the equality way. From selection consultancies we have noticed a remarkable tendency about women´s hiring in mostly male sectors. For example, this is being noticed in IT sector.
In any case, we must bear in mind that women and men have a certain work disposition in certain sectors, either by labor tradition or social stereotypes. For this reason, lower female presence in management positions have relation with lower female presence in the rest of different rank positions.
A female manager from 35 to 60 years old faces one of the main obstacles on the way to promotion in her profession: family and labor reconciliation, which today, continue being an exclusive problem in the female gender.
Although, it has been realized many social policies about improving the female flexibility and equality in the tasks distribution with man, in the last years. But the problem it is far away to be solved. In the same way, wage gap continue being a big obstacle to break the glass ceiling. In spite of efforts to correct this problem, female wages continue being worst paid that opposite gender. According to the last Salary Structure Survey realized by UGT, in 2015 women continued earn money 23,3% less than their men coworkers, reducing standard of living.
On the other hand, gender prejudices exist in some professions making difficult the women promotion of command positions. Work style is also different between men and women, but this does not call the attention to all the directors, although it has been discovered that there is a relationship between profitability and gender. In this way, companies with the highest number of women in high responsibility positions or managers have greater profitability.
The labor market should move along to parity, breaking with all glass ceiling types. In addition, it is a talent recruitment question also competitive and strategic advantages will improve. Companies with work policies which supporting the work and family life reconciliation and having an equity wages will help us to achieve a more equity market between genders.
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