Management sticks to gender – Kommersant

Only a small part of large Russian companies are ready to see women in the positions of CEO and CEO-1, even despite the shortage of qualified managers in the labor market, according to estimates from recruitment agencies surveyed by Kommersant. Experts talk about slow progress towards gender equality, but note an increase in the number of women in middle management positions, as well as in small and medium-sized businesses.

Women have become more likely to occupy management positions in Russian companies, according to data from recruitment agencies surveyed by Kommersant. Some of them note that the share of women among top managers is growing more slowly than among representatives of middle management. Thus, according to an analysis by UTEAM, in 2023, 34% of women applying for management positions received an offer from an employer. In 2021, this share was only 23%. “Many employers, who just a few years ago directly said that only men were considered for the role of directors, no longer set such a condition. Companies most often hiring women for management positions are retail, hotel and restaurant businesses, healthcare, marketing and advertising. Construction, extraction of raw materials and production remain the most closed areas for women managers,” says company general director Anna Krylova. According to hh.ru, women were invited to positions of top management in 2023 twice as often as a year earlier. “There is a decrease in the number of gender restrictions in Executive Search projects; competencies and personal characteristics are coming to the fore, rather than gender,” agrees Anastasia Vyalikova, practice leader at Kontakt InterSearch Russia.

As Natalya Shcherbakova, director of sales and marketing at ANCOR, explains, companies are expanding the pool of candidates due to a shortage in the labor market. “This is especially noticeable in the consumer goods sector. But there are changes even in stereotypically male areas – the industrial sector, working with construction materials, the mining industry. Functionally, these are often managers and executives in finance, marketing and legal departments. The trend in manufacturing is less pronounced, but there are already examples of women heading large engineering enterprises,” she says. A similar trend is being observed at Cornerstone. But at the same time, as her partner Vladislav Bykhanov explains, for example, “in industry, chief engineers or production directors are hired as CEOs, and these professions are often associated with heavy physical labor, and women rarely choose them.”

Managing partner of the consulting company RosExpert Oksana Morsina notes that although the topic of female leadership has been actively developing in the Russian Federation in recent years, the advancement of women is more noticeable in the positions of middle managers rather than top management. “If the trend continues, we will see women appointed to senior positions in large and major companies, but for now this is in the future,” she says. As Nadezhda Fedotova, head of the marketing and public relations department at UNITY, notes, the percentage of women among CEOs in the Russian Federation does not exceed 6% – as a rule, there are more women managers in medium and small businesses. “Owners of large companies still regularly say that ‘women can’t work properly’, although their number has decreased recently. There is a severe shortage of personnel in the managerial market—those who exist are demanding multiple increases in salary offers,” says Dina Akimova, managing partner of the Ruspartners agency.

The increase in hiring women for line positions is more pronounced – according to hh.ru estimates, in 2023, for the first time in three years, their share was 51% (1.5 million people, 1 percentage point higher than in 2021 and 2022). The number of invitations by employers of women to their vacancies (71 million) was 45% higher than the number of invitations of men (49 million).

It should be noted that achieving final gender equality in careers has proven more difficult than previously expected, not only in Russia – according to the World Bank, women now, on average, occupy only one in five positions on the boards of directors of the largest companies. On average, in the global labor market, they earn only 77 cents for every dollar that men are paid. At the same time, reducing the gender gap in hiring and business would allow the global economy to grow by an additional 20%.

Anastasia Manuilova