Europeans lag behind US corporations on gender balance - Building Gender Balanced Business

WOMEN-omics has compared the best ten companies from the Fortune 100 and from the top 20 multinationals in Europe according to the percentage of women appointed to their executive committees. It shows that US companies have been more successfully in promoting women to senior executive levels than their European counterparts.

This accords with our view that in the US the most progress has been made in the private sphere by companies, whereas in Europe and elsewhere governments have made more headway in creating societies in which women excel alongside men. They favour family-friendly policies such as equal access to employment, parental leave for men and women, and equal pay.

In the US, public policy has not caught up with Europe. In the latest Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum, the United States is ranked 53 out of 130 countries in terms of wage equality between men and women and 27 in terms of the participation of women in the workforce. Norway ranks at 10 for labour force participation and 23 for wage equality.

Overall, Norway, Finland and Sweden come in at the top three positions in the Global Gender Gap report, trailed by the US at 21st position.

European multinationals lag behind US corporations

However, as we can see many of Europe’s companies have not felt the need to take action with the same gusto as their American counterparts to advance more women to senior management positions.

• The results show that the best European multinationals perform very poorly in terms of gender balance when compared to their Fortune 100 counterparts.
• The top three Fortune 100 companies have 40% or more of their executive committees made up of women corporate officers, whereas the top three European multinationals have 25% or less.
• Only two European multinationals (Royal Dutch Shell and BP Amoco) have two women executives on their executive committees. The remaining eight companies have only one woman sitting on their executive committee.
• Only one company in our Fortune 100 top ten has two women sitting on its executive committee (Lockheed Martin). The remainder have between 3 and 4 women corporate officers on their executive committees.
• Three of the Fortune 100 companies are run by women CEOs (Kraft Foods, WellPoint and PepsiCo). None of the European top ten are run by a woman CEO.

Click here for our gender balance survey of the Fortune 100 companies.

We looked at the top ten Asian companies (drawn from the latest Fortune Global 500 listing) to see how many women were sitting on their executive committees.

The answer, as we expected, was not many! In fact, out of a sea of male faces only one woman sits on an executive committee of these major global enterprises. She is Chen Yueming, Executive Vice President and CFO of the state-owned Chinese company, State Grid.

Of the others…they include major brand names and well regarded companies such as Toyota, Nissan (run by Carlos Ghosn, a supporter of gender balance) and Samsung Electronics and none of the them have yet managed to raise women to their executive committees. This makes these companies the most male-dominated of our survey.