Martha Schulz, vice-president of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Commerce, says women’s employment must become an important European issue because the number of women leaders remains below expectations. According to Schultz
No substantive progress has been made in Austria and Germany in the past three or four years,
Therefore, it seeks closer cooperation at the international level with its female counterparts.
Monica Schulze-Strello, founding member and co-chair of Women on the Supervisory Board (FidAR) in Germany, recently sat down in Berlin to find solutions to the glass ceiling problem, which is still staggering in the two states.
According to the latest data from Statistik Austria, at the beginning of the year, for example, 9 percent of the CEOs of the 200 largest Austrian companies were women, while less than 24 percent of positions on boards of directors were filled.
The data is very weak, despite the fact that Austria pledged in 2011 to increase the proportion of women on supervisory boards to 35% by 2018, standard.
Nevertheless, Martha Schulz is optimistic: 35 percent of Austrian companies are run by women, which she says is a “good starting point”. However, the WKO Vice President envisages a mandatory 30% quota for these positions in order to achieve the European Commission’s “Women’s Charter”. presents its goals. In it, they definitely want to promote gender equality.
However, women in Germany are having a hard time, says Schulze-Strellow. The German business newspaper wrote that gender equality legislation affects very few companies, society is still not ready for change, and the global labor shortage caused by the pandemic has not helped the situation.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel also encourages them to get involved in politics. In the weekend issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he said: “We need to work to give women more self-confidence, because if they were present, they would not take part in the battles for the leadership of the party.”
Recently, for example, the online fashion retailer, which will soon appear in Hungary, took action against the quota system. Zalando has long rejected the goal of women in leadership positions, but a large-scale boycott smashed them in 2019, and since then has been in favor of increasing the number of women in leadership positions.
a KPMG In her research published in Women’s Day, she surveyed opinions about salaries, respect, and career expectations. According to a survey of hundreds of women leaders, less than half of respondents do not believe that the pandemic has slowed down actions to promote equal opportunity, but 92% agree that there is a long way to go before gender-balanced management is implemented. As it turns out, for example, that
Hungarian women leaders are more accessible compared to the global average, and building a personal network is more important to their success.
While in 2020, the average employment gap was 11.3 percent between men and women in the European Union (this is an improvement of only 0.3 percentage points compared to 2014 data), in Hungary it was about 10 percent in August. Recent data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) also shows that more and more women are working, with their number rising to 2,135,000 in the month of last summer.
(Cover image: Annette Riedl / picture alliance / Getty Images)
