Finance and HR lead as areas with the most female management in Spain

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

Finance and human resources are the areas with the most female managers in Spain. Specifically, they hold 46% and 41% of senior management positions in these departments, according to the Women In Business 2019 report run by Grant Thorton.

After finances and HR are the directives that perform the functions of CEO and general directors (24%), marketing directors (16%), partners and the commercial directors (13%), and operations directors (12%).

In contrast, only 9 out of 100 IT addresses are occupied by women, and only 4 out of 100 companies have a woman as a corporate controller.

“The shortage of women in managerial positions related to technology demonstrates the need to enhance the presence of women in STEM careers. Many companies are also reinforcing business-oriented careers as a useful specialization path for women to lead a managerial career with more guarantees of success,” says Isabel Perea, partner at Grant Thornton.

The report also highlights that 9 out of 10 Spanish companies already have at least one woman in a managerial position, despite the fact that only 12% of companies have objectives to promote gender equality at their management levels.

In an international comparison, in Spain there is a significantly higher proportion of financial directors and CEOs and general directors, with percentages almost 12 and 9 points above the world average, respectively. In contrast, the presence of women in the operations and IT departments and as corporate controllers is significantly higher globally.

"In recent years, the policies to boost female talent and parity have allowed women in Spain to be represented equally in such significant directions for companies such as finance or HR," says Perea.

"However, there is still a long way to go, given that women are still underrepresented in the management cadres of the marketing, sales, operations or systems departments," adds the Grant Thornton partner.

Need for equality plans

The analysis carried out by Grant Thornton highlights that one of the essential steps to boost female talent is to have an appropriate equality plan, a formal document that establishes gender parity in a company and that is directly correlated with obtaining results. However, currently, only 37% of Spanish companies have a document that marks these as priorities.

In this sense, the Women in Business 2019 report reflects that in those companies that have these types of plans, women already occupy 35% of management positions, five points higher than the general average.

The formalization of commitments in the field of gender equality only follows, therefore, in practically one in three companies, and much less, only 18%, sets parity objectives in its senior management.

“Having a formal equality plan is a clear way to institutionalize organizations' commitment to equality, given that it includes principles, initial diagnoses, objectives to be achieved, measures that allow them to be achieved and evaluation criteria. All of them are common procedures with the company's own strategic planning,” concludes Aurora Sanz, a labor partner at Grant Thornton.

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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