Women at the Top: Good for Business
DAGENS INDUSTRI – Sweden’s leading business newspaper November 2001 MORE WOMEN IN EXECUTIVE POSITIONS:
Marti Barletta of the USA’s Trendsight Group has convinced Volvo Cars top management that it makes financial sense to include women in this group. Marti Barletta, chief executive of the US-based Trendsight Group, believes that female executives are good for business. Barletta recently visited Volvo Cars, which, a year ago, decided that at least twenty-percent of its employees at all levels should be women. But that goal is still a long way off. At present, ten men—and no women—make up the top management team at Volvo Cars. Women constitute twenty percent of the company’s entire workforce, but that figure is lower for managerial positions. The Trendsight Group focuses on marketing to women and also conducts research on gender trends in the corporate world. Biological Differences In her lecture at Volvo Cars, Barletta explained that more paths link the various paths of a woman’s brain to each other, making it easier for her to multitask. As a result, women are less likely to have one-track minds, which explains why they are better able to manage several projects simultaneously. “Numerous studies have shown that men and women are different. I believe that many of these differences are biological,” continued Barletta. “I thought that women and men made equally good managers. The fact that women are better than men comes as news to me,” commented Sven Eckerstein, Senior Vice President HR, after the lecture. “Now we have a sound reason for seeking female managers, even if more men than women apply for these positions,” he added. Eckerstein believes that within the year the top management team will include a woman and that it will take another year or two for women to make up twenty percent of the team. Increased Profits Marti Barletta does not talk about politically correct feminism. Rather, she uses statistics and economics to demonstrate that company profits increase when women are part of management. “It is easier to achieve gender equality in companies by spreading this knowledge than by enacting laws,” she explained. Giving women leadership roles also encourages those in other positions in the firm to stay at their jobs. If a woman feels alone among all of the male employees, there is a much greater risk that she will leave her company, which, in its turn, will lose invaluable expertise. In the United States, it is not unusual for women to start their own companies rather than remain in male-dominated ones. In the last ten years, women started seventy percent of new US-based companies. |
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