“It is time for female leadership. We want to be treated as people and women are the ones who can best humanize the company”, says Nuria Chinchilla, professor of People Management in Organizations at the IESE business school, who participated this Monday in the La Pedrera auditorium in Barcelona in the round table on “The challenges of equality”, organized by LaVanguardia and which included the participation of Mercadona’s Director of Diversity, Elena Ribelles; the director of Persones i Organització de Aigües de Barcelona, ??Rebeca Marín, and the expert in female leadership Marta Ríos, moderated by the newspaper’s editor-in-chief of Society, Susanna Quadrado.
The speakers agreed to point out the importance of increasing the presence of women in senior management. However, they also warned of the existence of obstacles for women to stand out in their professional careers.
Professor Nuria Chinchilla identifies various barriers for women to reach positions of responsibility in organizations, which she classifies as external and internal. The external barriers, in his opinion, come from living in “a world thought of by men”. “Companies are organized for a work-focused individual where family and personal life have no place,” she insists.
As for internal barriers, according to Nuria Chinchilla, they form “cement ceilings that forge women’s self-esteem.” Because of this negative perception they have about themselves, unlike men, women “negotiate less for themselves than for others”, a trend that harms them both in selection processes and when it comes to promotion or agreement your remuneration.
“Our brain leads us to be stricter with ourselves,” recalls Nuria Chinchilla, appealing to the laws of neuroscience. And she continues: “if she has five of the six skills that the position asks for, a woman does not apply, while a man with three of six skills already presents himself as a candidate.”
“Women have to be convinced to move up,” adds Marta Ríos, who has a career of more than 25 years assuming responsibility positions in multinationals, the last one in the Adidas group, where she was the first woman to occupy the direction of the group in 2017. The speaker believes that this “mental burden” weighs more heavily on women than on men due to the “feeling of guilt for not spending time with the children to work or dedicate time to other activities such as the sport”. Chinchilla, for her part, also recognizes that women “find it more difficult to network”, in view of what she recommends “working more on the network of relationships”.
Another added difficulty is the “lack of female references”, highlights the leadership expert Marta Ríos. “We have to have references in all spheres, but in STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for its acronym in English – we have a significant gap. The future is going to be technological, but only 30% of girls choose STEM professions”, recalls Mercadona’s Director of Diversity, Elena Ribelles.
To reverse the deficit of female presence in scientific and technological professions, the director of People and Organization of Aigües de Barcelona, ??Rebeca Marín, advocates the “promotion of STEM training”. “Co-responsibility at home is necessary, as is ending the wage gap and the digital divide, and fighting against stereotypes in education”, highlights the directive as the main obstacles to female professional development.
Cultural and social factors play an essential role in the field of equality. The objective must be “to avoid conscious and unconscious biases in society and organisations, focusing on co-responsibility and conciliation policies understood in the broad sense of making the connection between work and family life possible”, suggests Elena Ribelles.
“Reconciliation is everyone’s business. Without co-responsibility there is no gender equality. But companies have limited room for manoeuvre, there must be promotion of public and social policies, and work must also be done from education and families”, proposes the director of Diversity of Mercadona.
This supermarket chain, which has a workforce made up of 95,800 professionals, promotes “a culture of equality, fairness and respect for difference” and deploys “strategies to attract and retain talent”, reveals Elena Ribelles. Among them, “measures conciliation” such as the deployment of intensive shifts in stores, the assignment of workplaces close to homes or the extension of maternity, paternity and breastfeeding leave and for fathers and mothers”.
Regarding salary policy, at Mercadona it is based on the principle of “same responsibility, same salary” since 1997, prior to the approval of the equality decrees that oblige companies to carry out salary audits. In addition, there is “parity” in the management team of this supermarket chain, as well as “female leadership in traditionally masculinized departments such as logistics or IT so that women serve as role models,” she highlights.
Companies must have “active promotion policies”, highlights the director of People and Organization of Aigües de Barcelona. Her company promotes equality between men and women in its teams and is committed to parity in its management bodies. “Given equal abilities, why not choose a woman?” asks Rebeca Marín rhetorically. Her company, she explains, is “in the process of transformation.” “Bearing in mind that scientific and technological careers continue to be masculinized, in the face of curricular equality, we chose women,” she reveals.
Faced with the moderator’s question about why feminism is confused with opposition to men, the speakers first clarify that, as defined by the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, feminism is the “principle of equal rights of women and men ”.
Feminism is “a movement that men and women must address together”, agrees the director of Diversity at Mercadona, who acknowledges that for a long time it has been a “maligned or pejorative term” because it was not understood as “the achievement of the equal rights”.
“Feminism is the search for the same rights for men and women”, also insists the director of People and Organization of Aigües de Barcelona. Professor Nuria Chinchilla advocates the use of the term “synergistic feminism” with the aim of “multiplying the work of men and women”. “Men must be our allies,” Marta Ríos claims in the same way while she asks herself: “Who can deny equal opportunities?” “You cannot live today without being a feminist,” she concludes.
