See Which Countries Have More Women Managers and Company Owners
DAVOS, Switzerland — Female participation was at the top of the agenda for this year’s World Economic Forum, with noticeably more women-focused events prominently held around the meeting. A “Female Quotient” pavilion on Davos’ main drag pulled in some of the most powerful women and men in the world, with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Executive Director of U.N. Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka and Unilever CEO Paul Polman all speaking. The feminine-geist was strong enough for Quartz to declare “the Davos Woman” the winner of this year’s forum.
These efforts, though, couldn’t mask the still woeful proportion of female participants at the annual event, which stood at just 21 percent, up 3 percent from last year. If Davos is a screen shot of the world’s financial elite, women there still aren’t making up anywhere near their share.
So, to take a wider look at the state of women in business globally, Pro Journo has examined the number of women holding ownership and top management positions in countries around the world.
The visualization here is based on statistics from the World Bank’s enterprise surveys, which, among other things, record the percentage of companies with female owners or a female top manager. The data is only for emerging countries.
Besides Brazil, you can see that the highest levels of female participation are focused in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia. According to a report from the Hurun Research Institute, China is the world leader in the number of self-made female billionaires, with 49 out of the 73 women in total. Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, meanwhile, top the ranking for companies with women in a top senior-management role, with 65 percent of companies led by women, according to the World Bank data. That compares starkly with the European Union, where the average of senior female executives is a mere 11 percent, according to a 2013 European Commission report. That’s further backed up by a 2014 study by Grant Thornton that showed China has nearly double the percentage of female senior managers compared to the US, UK or Germany: 38 percent versus the roughly 20 percent in the US and UK and just 14 percent in Germany.
In some ways, this is not surprising. According to the Women’s Entrepreneurship Conference Bangkok, Southeast Asia is home to 61 million female entrepreneurs, more than the Europe and the U.S. combined. Some suggest, however, that the higher levels of female participation in these Asian countries may reflect a larger feature concerning how the world’s economies are growing more generally.
“The Western countries have already built-in structures and predominantly male networks that govern them in an economy that has grown over decades, where having a sponsor is a must,” said Carole Hofmann, founder and president of WomenWay, a female-focused business network in Switzerland. “The economy of Asia is not distributed yet. It’s more meritocratic and egalitarian, with more chances which women can use.”
Plenty of people will dispute that idea, pointing to the conservative patriarchal cultures and male-dominated politics in many Asian countries, including China. But the rapidity with which women are entering senior levels of business in some emerging economies is still notable. This perhaps explains why some women in Davos this year, while deploring the low representation and appalled by the rise of Donald Trump, still said they felt there has never been a better time to be a woman.
