In Austria, the share of women at the top of listed companies is 7.3 percent.
Researchers at the University of Salzburg and Innsbruck have examined how companies react to the increasing social and political pressure to fill executive board positions with women and which functions “quota women” are entrusted with in executive floors. Your comparative study with 172 listed companies from five European countries shows that women on executive boards are assigned the human resources that is connoted as female more often than the average.
In Austria, however, this aspect is not pronounced, announced the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS) on Thursday. Everywhere, however, women are still a rarity on the executive board. On the 172 board members of listed companies in Austria, Germany, France, Spain and Sweden, 240 women were among the 1,543 board members.
In Austria, the share of women at the top of listed companies is 7.3 percent. Women’s quotas are a political measure for the equal participation of women in management positions, write the scientists.
The economists Astrid Reichel, Isabella Scheibmayr (both University of Salzburg) and Julia Brandl (University of Innsbruck) have investigated the functions in which women are active on boards. Their results were recently published in the “Human Resource Management Journal” – see http://go.apa.at/QDYkpiiP. The five countries were selected because “there is very different social and legal pressure”, says Reichel, professor for human resource management at PLUS.
Her summary: “Institutional pressure brings women to the board of directors, and organizations react to it in a way that follows gender stereotypes, so that there is horizontal segregation along the functions of boards as well. For the functions concerned, especially HR, you can increased being represented on boards, however, goes hand in hand with gains in status. “
“In France there is high social pressure and a statutory gender quota. In 2016, Germany introduced a statutory minimum quota of women on the supervisory board and also obliged companies to set a quota for themselves on the executive board,” says Reichel. The new legislative proposal in Germany from the beginning of 2020 stipulates that board members must now contain at least one woman and a self-set goal of “zero women” no longer applies.
In Spain there is also a gender quota for the Executive Board, but with no sanction options. In Austria there is a legal obligation for the supervisory board, but none for the executive board. “Sweden, for example, has high normative requirements for companies, but no legal obligation to fill board positions with women. In France there is high social pressure and a statutory gender quota”, says Reichel.
In their comparative study, the researchers found “that, when faced with social and legal pressure with regard to gender equality, organizations respond by entrusting women with functions on the executive board that have female connotations and are stereotyped”. Accordingly, there is a systematic overrepresentation of women as HR directors, said Reichel. The women scientists also noticed that the area of human resource management often only comes on board with women, according to co-author Scheibmayr from the Human Resource Management Group at the University of Salzburg.
The observed effect is not due to an increased female job offer in the area of human resource management. Reichel: “The effect that women are overrepresented as human resource managers can only be seen in countries with high institutional pressure to fill board positions with women. Where there is hardly any pressure – as in Austria – the few women on the board level are not systematically more likely to be human resources are more responsible than other functions, although they also make up the majority of human resource management staff at lower levels in these countries. “
The scientists basically state that the position of the personnel director in the “secret management hierarchy” is worth less than, for example, the position of the director of finance. In the study, they cite a “cynical comment” from the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ): “If women are appointed to a board of directors, they are preferably entrusted with the personnel department, in which – of course, only behind closed doors – Assumption that this is where you could do the least harm. “
