L. Duksaitė: Women at the top of their careers – where do they go when they don’t make it to the top?

When you look at the numbers, it’s a mystery: there are more women in Lithuania. There are more women than men with higher education (according to the Department of Statistics). But there are twice as many female managers as male managers.

In theory, there should be a better chance of selecting a leader from a larger pool of candidates. But in reality, this is not the case. There are twice as many women managers as men. And the higher up you go, the lower the number of women. If we can still find a third of female heads of department, we can barely find a tenth of female top managers.

The same is true globally. McKinsey & Company’ s Women in the workplace, 2023 study shows that while there is an equal number of women and men at the start, the proportions become more skewed as you move up the ladder.

Why?

Obviously, this is not a question of competence. Sometimes it’s a lack of ambition, a lack of self-esteem, a lack of courage to take risks (and these are the stereotypes that we are beating into our daughters’ heads).

But in general, it is noticeable that the problem is programmed already at the first step of the career ladder. For every 100 male promotions, there are only 87 female promotions.

A career break to have children also contributes. This is supported by the fact that it is in the 30-39 age bracket (when children are born and before they start school) that the income gap between women and men is widest. This is because women spend on average 2.5 years caring for their children, compared to 1.5 months for men.

Plus, women experience more micro-aggressions than men: that is, they are 1.5-2 times more likely to have their ideas devalued, their proposals questioned, to be mistaken for inferior, to have their dress or emotional reactions commented on.

Can a policy of quotas on boards change the balance of women?

Absolutely. With more women on boards, their voice will also be more decisive in decisions on female C-level executives. The quota policy in general encourages greater attention to this gender imbalance, which has been going on for many years, and even the last decade has not eradicated this trend. For example, when we are looking for a CEO, a CEO, we normally have 10-12 male candidates and 1 female.

In just a couple of years, the EU Directive will make it mandatory to declare gender equality not only on paper, but also on the ground, on the boards of listed companies.