Women at the Top: A Struggle?

In 2008, Siemens was the first company on the DAX 30 index of German blue-chip companies to appoint a woman, Barbara Kux, to its executive board. Do European women executives suffer from a "pipeline leak" or from an "upgrade problem"? And what needs to be done to close the gender gap in European C-level positions?

Compared to other companies in Germany and much of Europe, Siemens has made path-breaking moves in terms of corporate gender diversity.

When the company named its second woman, Brigitte Ederer, to the board last summer, it raised the share of of women in the Siemens executive suite to 25 percent.

That is almost triple the average of 8.5 percent in German companies. It is double the European Union average of roughly 12 percent.

By comparison, in the United States, roughly 40 percent of all private-sector managers are women, according to The New York Times, which cites Government Accounting Office statistics.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, has put the percentage of women in C-level positions at "15, 16 percent." In this video she spoke about the issue at the Davos World Economic Forum.

Elsewhere, Ms. Sandberg said that of 200 heads of state worldwide, nine are women, and 13 percent of parliament members are women.

People who think the discrepancy stems from women taking maternity leaves or building families should think again. Eileen Taylor, global diversity manager of Deutsche Bank, mentioned "these assumptions that the reason the pipeline is leaking is because the women are going off to have babies."

But an analysis by the bank in 2010 showed that no more than 5 percent of its women were on maternity leave at any given time.

"European companies are waking up--but most are just starting these efforts," said Herminia Ibarra, a leadership professor at Insead, the European Institute of Business Administration, in Fontainebleau, France. "They are realizing that it's really about changing the culture."

When the World Economic Forum conducted a survey among 600 large companies last year, managers most often cited a "masculine or patriarchal corporate culture" and "lack of role models" as among the biggest obstacles for would-be female leaders.

Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner, has hinted at mandating a 30 percent board quota for women across the EU by 2015 if companies fail to get there on their own.

Quotas have worked well in India, where one-third of panchayat (local governing council) leaders must be women by law. In the last election, one million women won seats as panchayat leaders.

But quotas are not enough to transform a culture. Ms. Taylor at Deutsche Bank recently began grooming talented women by pairing them up with top managers. Since September 2009, the bank has provided 30 women with mentors from its executive committee -- all twelve of them men.

What do you think? What's missing for women to get into leadership positions? What can be done? And what have you experienced? I look forward to reading you on my blog (http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/).

All the best,

P.S. To download my new book Leading Leaders: The Art and Science of Boosting Return on People (ROP) for free, go to Leading-Leaders.