No growth in hiring rate for women in top South Africa jobs - Building Gender Balanced Business

• A partner of a leading South African executive search firm says that the share of women she has seen placed in top positions has stagnated at 30% of all candidates, despite companies’ stated desire to improve gender diversity in those roles.

• Madge Gibson, a partner at Jack Hammer Executive Headhunters, said the hiring rate has been flat for the past three years.

• Women make up 52% of South Africa’s adult population but only 41% of the working population, 14.7% of all executive managers and a mere 7.1% of directors at leading publicly listed companies.

• A study, “The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity”, found that in South Africa, like most other places, more women in senior management is directly linked to corporate outperformance. But it also found that in the country half again as many women are chairperson of their corporate board as are CEO. Only 1.9% of South African CEOs are women.

• Aversion to risk may explain the stagnation in part, Gibson said, as might family commitments. “While this doesn’t make women any less efficient or driven, it does mean that they give greater consideration to the effects that career advancement and relocations would have on their husband and children. They attempt to attain a better work life balance.”

• “On the other hand,” she added, “single women, or women without children, are often tremendously ambitious and do not hold back at all with regards to achieving their goals.”

The Cape Business News article