Editorial: Where are the women executives?

Apart from a few exceptional female executives, some of whom are at the helm of a number of companies, one needs a radar with advanced searching capabilities to find able women among the business elite.

The last two elections produced a poor result for the female candidates, with Cyprus at the bottom of the league of women in parliament, in government administration and in local town councils. But that is as a result of a few good women who have struggled to rise up the political ladder of the ruling and opposition parties.

Ironically, the ‘progressive’ political parties that rule the land today, have fewer women in their hierarchy than the opposition. Women voters are as much to blame for this apathy, inasmuch as potential female candidates who have not come forward to challenge a seat on the local ballot paper, despite the funds that poured into campaigns to encourage women to vote for women.

That is why some of the few success stories in Cyprus come from the private sector, where the Business and Professional Women, as well as other organizations of female professionals representing various layers of management, have excelled on their own, without any public funding or other efforts from the male-dominated government machine.

It is true that certain women have risen up the civil service ladder. However for more of this to happen we need more reforms, not necessarily to introduce a quota system, which has backfired in many democratic societies, but for reforms in the tools provided to allow women to excel in their field.

A workshop organized by BPW in Nicosia this week focused on the new career opportunities available to women in order to break into new sectors of the economy. Ironically, though, all five speakers were men. Was it not possible to find five success stories of women who have left their mark in the fields of health, real estate, IT, technical training and the media?

There are enough or at least a satisfactory proportion of women already in the overcrowded professionals of education and medicine, while in the saturated sectors of accounting and law, despite the high ratio of women, senior partners in firms are still hard to come by.

Two things need to be done, as not only will the women find better employment opportunities, but in the case of the success stories they will contribute significantly to the economy as well: teach women professionals to reach for the highest goals; and provide the financial tools to allow women-owned start-ups establish themselves in the market or enlarge their business.

Though the first women’s cooperative bank aims to do just that, the incentives are hardly any different from what you get from the bank around the corner. Come to think, it’s not just women’s start-ups that need a financial or technical boost, but all SMEs that are languishing between facilities that are more prone to strangle a good idea than let it flourish.