More women take corner office in banking, service sectors
Female executives and entrepreneurs are increasingly making their presence known in Polish business, particularly in the finance and service sectors.
While women have worked for decades in Poland a function of communism they rarely made it to the top position unless it was to fulfill a certain quota. Today a handful of major companies such as the country's second-largest bank, Pekao, conglomerate Elektrim, Bank Przemyslowo-Handlowy (BPH) and insurer Towarzystwo Ubezpieczeniowe Compensa sport female CEOs and presidents. However, a predominance of men at the top still exists.
"There are more women in good jobs than before and despite what people think of their abilities, it shows that you can do it as a woman," said Miroslawa Kucharska, owner of training and consulting firm Schenk Institute.
Women are also starting more businesses. Between 25-30% of Polish businesses are owned by women, up from around 12.5% four years ago, said Beata Siudzinska, secretary of the Association of Polish Women Entrepreneurs PSWF. This figure is also set to increase, with forecasts predicting that in the next 10 years women will own one in three new businesses, she said. But these entrepreneurs will have to battle the same lack of capital and burdensome taxes and regulations that dampen small-business growth in Poland.
"It concerns not only women, but men too ... (there is) no capital, no credit from the banks with an acceptable level of (interest) rates," said Anna Janczewska-Radwan, president of Medim, a firm specializing in the sale and service of medical equipment, and president of the (PSWF).
In many countries women have become entrepreneurs because they felt that they could ultimately see more gain from their skills than in the traditional corporate structure where they can still be subjected to stereotypes and discrimination, Janczewska-Radwan said.
That entrepreneurial spirit is particularly strong in Poland, regardless of gender. Poland has more entrepreneurs than other Central and Eastern European countries and a relatively large proportion of these are women, said Alicja Malecka, president of investment fund manager Pioneer PPTFI. Malecka was unsure what exact percentage of those were women owned.
Communism had something to do with it, she said. About 40% of Polish women had jobs in the 1960s and 1970s, she said. That was due more to economic necessity than the desire to have a career, Malecka said. That in turn got women used to working, and used to business, she said.
"(They were) more expected and accepted in the labor force ... it made them much more entrepreneurial, aggressive and open to it," Malecka said. That phenomenon also laid the foundation for the swift introduction of women into the leader-molding, middle-management ranks, which did not exist before the collapse of communism. Women also account for roughly 50% of all service-sector positions, an area of the economy that has seen the most growth in the last 10 years, Malecka said.
That history has meant that Polish women have moved from low, to middle, to upper management with relative speed as opposed to the decades it took in the West.
"The process happens much faster here," Malecka said. "The increase in the ranks of women in upper levels of management only took place in the last six years in the United States ... there were no women CEOs (there) until six years ago."
Financial services is currently the area where female management and business leaders are the most deeply involved: two of the country's top banks, Bank Pekao and BPH, are headed by female presidents, Maria Wisniewska and Henryka Pieronkiewicz respectively. Women traditionally make the most headway in sales and financial services, as they are judged by quantifiable measures, such as a return on investment or total sales. Another factor for their success in financial services in Poland is that during communism accountancy was traditionally a female occupation. Since 1989 many women capitalized on their experience and took up posts in this field, Schenk's Kucharska said.
It is also easier for women to take top jobs in firms in these sectors because they require higher education, plus "intellectual acumen and determination, more so than sheer physical power," Malecka said. Furthermore, women have been attracted to the sector's fast growth. While banking is a long-established and time-honored profession in Western Europe and the United States, it started from scratch here. "Women, having been relative newcomers to business, would typically be like any other minority and gravitate to new development where there is no established class blocking entry," Malecka said. "You have a very, very good example of this in Poland."
However, other areas in the service sector are producing more female leaders. Women run a number of the human resource firms created in recent years. Industry members attributed their success to being more in tune with clients. In addition, greater opportunities exist in advertising firms and more women-led magazines are springing up such as Twoj Styl, Cosmopolitan and Vogue. Though one high-growth sector, information technology, has not yet attracted vast numbers of women, and university technical courses are still primarily filled with men, Malecka said.
