Portugal is lagging behind in terms of gender diversity in top management, with a consequent impact on gender equality in employment Ð in the Boards of companies, there are only 15,6% of women in big companies, 20% in medium sized, 24,2% in small companies, and 30,4% in microbusinesses (in Informa D&B).
The last study available shows that when there are women in top management, the whole chain of management tends to be mixed in _ of the cases, whereas in the case of boards of men, in half the cases, the chain of command is exclusively masculine. When there are at least two women in the board, the management team has 52% of women, whereas when the board is exclusively male, there are only 18% of women in management (in Informa D&B). This influences all the employment chain. This is all the more shocking when you consider that the gap in labor force participation is only 6,4% (OECD, 2017).
Besides the justice of addressing this gap, that is closing extremely slowly, it has been proven that diversity, gender or otherwise, influences firms’ capacity for innovation and therefore its resilience and its results. So, this problem impacts directly in our economy: in the last crisis, there were experts pointing out that more women on the boards of companies would have prevented a lot of value destruction.
In the past, IAPMEI has chosen successfully to work with good examples as a means to induce better practices and behaviors. We have, for a great number of years, worked with the distinctions PME L’der and PME Excelncia (SME Leader and SME Excellence) as a means to create advantages for sound financial companies and thus induce firms to cut their debts.
We decided therefore to create a project centered in good, solid, some of them flagship companies, from prime areas like Industry and T- KIBS, and more recently special tourism projects, with women on their boards. The idea was to encourage a community of practices, embracing diversity, in terms of sectors and in terms of size, with firms ranging from very small to large companies, with only two things in common Ð high performance, innovative companies, with executive women with the willingness to share knowledge, problems, solutions and, whenever they felt comfortable, business.
So, the project, meant to break insulation of women in top management in innovative firms, was originally designed with the help of 15 top managers of 14 highly performative SMEs, tested for around 6 months and was then launched by IAPMEI, the SME Public Agency, in the first semester of 2017. The management of the network is now shared between IAPMEI and 7 women entrepreneurs.
Although some of these women are special, most of them are not. There are founders, yes, but also wives, daughters and granddaughters, other relatives, professional CEOs, etc. They replicate families and the social fabric, just like men on top of the organizations do.
It was not easy to identify executive women, since a lot of women signaled as ÒexecutiveÓ are not. Also, some of the daughters donÕt have total command of their agendas, and some of the husbands donÕt value an experience such as RML and nag them about the time they ÒloseÓ in these meetings.
In some cases, being well known success cases, they had too many participation requests.
But a large majority of those women were pretty isolated, with their hands on their day to day demands, with poor work-family conciliation. Their business performance was recognized as good and, more important, their results as top managers were good. In most of the cases, although not in all, their professional networking was poor. The improvement of their network, with RML, has enhanced their confidence and, in some of the cases, their self-esteem. It may also have affected their strategic and tactic approach. It has certainly affected, on occasion, processes, choice of solutions and/ or of equipment.
ItÕs interesting to notice that in a bit over two years, a professional network evolved into friendship, in some cases. And in a region, especially, families have started to bond in their spare time, including the husbands entrepreneurs, in theirs or in other companies.