Women in eastern Europe lead the way to senior roles

Taking her seat for her first meeting of the global strategy council of PwC last July, the arrival of Olga Grygier-Siddon, chair for central and eastern Europe, was well timed.

The professional services provider was set to discuss a recent survey to measure the level of diversity among its senior management. "There was a collective sense of relief around the table when they saw me," says the first female ever to sit on the council.

That central and eastern Europe should provide PwC with this gender diversity breakthrough is not a surprise to many in the region, which tops global rankings for representation of females in senior corporate roles.

Seven of the top 10 countries for female representation among senior executives are in eastern Europe, headed by world leader Russia, where four out of every 10 business leaders are women, according to research by Grant Thornton, a professional services provider.

The global average, according to the firm's latest report on women in business is for 22 per cent of senior jobs to be held by women. In eastern Europe, that figure is 35 per cent, although it tends to be in unlisted companies that women are better represented.

Poland is the best performer in the EU, with 37 per cent of senior management jobs held by women, followed by the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The EU average is 26 per cent, with the UK on 22 per cent and Germany, at 14 per cent, lagging behind.

"It was a big message for the people here, a huge message," says Ms Grygier-Siddons, who was elected to her role by a secret ballot of all the partners in the region, a majority of whom are men.

"Definitely the women in this company walked a little taller on my first day [as regional chair]," adds the Polish-born, British-educated executive. "That was one of the greatest feelings . . . That smile when you get into the lift. And there were congratulations from women in the office but also women from outside the office."

She is not alone in her position. In Hungary, Ulrica Fearn runs the global shared services and outsourcing operations for Diageo, the world's biggest spirits group.

Mariana Gheorghe is the chief executive of OMV Petrom, Romania's largest company, and the biggest oil and gas producer in southeast Europe.

And Monika Rajska-Wolinska, head of Colliers International in Poland, was this month named the top executive in the region's property industry at CEEQA, the highly-regarded sector event.

"In our region we have places like Latvia where there are two female [PwC] partners out of two," says Ms Grieger-Siddons. "I go there for a meeting . . . and 80 per cent of the people in the room are women."

Analysts agree that the region's chequered and unique history can help to explain the trend.

The huge numbers of men killed during the second world war in eastern Europe and Russia created a demand for women to learn skills and take jobs previously dominated by men.

Further, the Communist regime that controlled the region after the war until 1989 had a policy of encouraging women to work. It offered, for example, technical education programmes to both genders.

"Certainly there are a lot of very successful women in the senior management roles in central and eastern Europe," says Malgorzata Kolakowska, chief executive of ING Bank in Poland.

"Women in this region have always been professionally active, hence the representation in the senior management should not be a surprise. Entrepreneurship and the willingness to make things happen is in our genes," she adds.

But the overall data mask areas in which the region lags behind western peers. Primary industries such as mining, manufacturing and construction - crucial parts of the region's economies - are typically heavily staffed by men.

And in terms of female representation at large publicly listed companies, eastern Europe fares worse than the west.

According to a 2013 report by the European Commission, only Latvia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic of the region's countries beat the EU average for the percentage of female directors at major public companies.

That is partly due to the dominance of government-controlled companies on the region's stock markets, where female executives can often struggle to rise up through the heavily bureaucratic command structures, influenced by a heavily male-dominated political class.

At the European Economic Congress this month in Katowice, Poland, one of Central and eastern Europe's biggest business forums, just 12 of the opening day's 91 speakers were female, at an event dominated by the region's state-owned companies.

"The labour market is not adjusted to women's needs because its frameworks were created when the vast majority of workers were male," said Dorota Warakomska, president of Kongres Kobiet, a Polish organisation that lobbies for female equality in business.

Eastern Europe's conservative political discourse, often heavily influenced by strong religious affiliations among voters, can also lead to less liberal policies towards working women, such as maternity leave regulations and workplace equality measures.

Stereotypes - that "women work less, they are more absent at work, they are not that efficient" - are still prevalent among many older male executives in the region, Ms Warakomska adds.

That could slowly change as Poland, Hungary, Estonia and other eastern European states focus on fostering private start-ups and entrepreneurs to drive their economies closer to the EU average, rather than relying on labour-intensive manufacturing and industry, which is traditionally dominated by state-owned companies led by male executives.

Ms Grygier-Siddons, who became the first woman to lead PwC in Poland in 2009, says that her next task is to increase the number of women directly reporting to her, while encouraging other businesses she works with to increase their proportion of female leaders.

She says that the pace of change can be frustratingly slow. But it is "a journey that we are on", she adds. "We are absolutely on the right track."

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