Women at the Helm of Major Croatian Companies: More of Them, But Still Fewer Than Men

Selectio, a leading Croatian company for recruitment and HR consulting, has been calculating the CROBEX index of women since 2014, which shows the share of women in the management boards of companies included in the CROBEX index, comprising the 25 most significant companies on the Zagreb Stock Exchange. After three years of stagnation, in the last 18 months, the share of women has increased by as much as 4 percentage points from 16.3%, reaching 20.7% in June 2016, reports Croatian Jutarnji, as conveyed by the Patria News Agency.

The top 5 companies with the highest share of women on their management boards are Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d. (100%), Ledo d.d. (50%), OT-OPTIMA TELEKOM d.d. (50%), Podravka d.d. (50%), and Hrvatski Telekom d.d (33.3%) and Zagrebačka banka d.d. (33.3%).

In the ten-year period from 2006 to June 2016, the share of women on the management boards of Croatian companies comprising the CROBEX index increased by almost 10 percentage points.

The calculation of the CROBEX index of the share of women on the management boards of companies in the CROBEX index allows for tracking trends and comparing Croatia with the average of other European countries according to The Female FTSE Board Report 2015. Thus, according to the latest available data from The Female FTSE Board Report from March 2015, the highest number of women on management boards is in Norway (as much as 38.9%) and Finland (32.1%), France (28.5%), and Sweden (27.5%).

Interestingly, at that time, Croatia, with 16.3% of women on management boards, was slightly behind Germany (16.6%) but ahead of Austria (10.7%), Luxembourg (8.9%), and Switzerland (13.9%).
The global average for 2014 was 11.5%, with the exception of Australia (22.6%) and the USA (21.2%), indicating a higher number of women on the management boards of large companies in developed countries.

Although still proportionally small, the representation of women in business is significantly higher than in higher science, as only 10% of women are regular members of HAZU (Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts), while in the 8th convocation of the Croatian Parliament, the share of women is currently equal to that in company management boards, with female representatives making up 20.5%.

An analysis of the trend in the share of female representatives in the last three convocations of the Parliament shows that in the sixth convocation it was 25.5%, in the seventh convocation 25.2%, and in the current eighth convocation, the share of women has decreased by as much as 5 percentage points, so we can conclude that the political scene is not following the growth trend of women's share seen in business.

Global initiatives aimed at increasing the number of women on management boards focus on raising public awareness, strategic leadership, and company transparency as three key elements driving change.

In addition to the aforementioned initiatives, the global trend is also the reduction of "zero companies," i.e., companies that have no women on their management boards. Among FTSE250 companies, 9.2% fall into this category, while in Croatian companies within the CROBEX index, 47.8% currently have no women on their management boards.

Many years were needed for the issue of the number of women on management boards to be taken seriously, but it is currently gaining momentum in Europe that is unlikely to change. And leading Croatian businesses are doing better in this trend than politics and academia, according to the Jutarnji article.