Improving Women's Status in Business Activity

The purpose of the seminar is to present a summary of the research in this area to determine if the presence of women can affect the operation of the business, and how it influences business.

 

In my opinion, the seminar will surely get the attention of many women entrepreneurs Vietnam as well as researchers and psychologists, and especially young girls who are ambitious to conquer new ground in many difficult, thorny areas in social activity.

 

Besides, I have known that the presence of women in the board has been the subject of many a heated debate among practitioners, politicians and researchers. Some developed countries in Europe recently started applying quotas to ensure a balance between men and women in the board and monitoring the activities of listed companies.

 

In fact, in the world prospect, we can easily identify through research that many companies having female leaders are often more successful than those companies with few or none. But in fact, there are many qualified women not put in important positions. However, this trend has gradually improved, as evidenced by the recent increasing number of women entering key positions in enterprise governance.

 

In addition, the proportion of women in low and middle level management roles has also increased rapidly for a long time. However, this figure remains quite small in senior management positions. According to a research in the United States, women account for more than half of the US team and management in low and middle levels of the big companies, but only 14 percent of senior managers and 3 percent of CEOs are female. Particularly, among major listed companies in the US stock market, only 16 percent of board members are women. This rate is also lower than in the southern European countries. Only the Nordic countries have a significant number of women in management. However, the pressure to increase the percentage of female leaders is rising everywhere, particularly in Europe.

 

Among the member states of the EU, the potential significant contribution of women can be recognized; some countries such as France have passed a law requiring all companies to increase the percentage of women directors to 40 percent by the end of this decade. In Spain, some big state owned and private companies will have to increase the number of women in management to 40 percent by 2015. Germany is currently in controversy about whether to impose targets for the percentage of women board members or not, and some big companies have done this voluntarily. Norway, which is not an EU member, defined a ratio of 40 percent female board members nearly a decade ago. The country has achieved this goal in 2009, but since then the ratio has declined somewhat.

 

Besides, with their success, more younger CEOs showed the appeal of women in leadership positions as higher than ever. These include: Marissa Mayer (young CEO of Yahoo, who put her faith on saving Yahoo from the current crisis) or Sheryl Sandberg (board member of Facebook). The names were set out to demonstrate this new trend, that boards including only men have started to become obsolete in recent years.

 

Recently, according to a study by the French Department of Economic Statistics, wage differentials between men and women were seen in all sectors at all levels, from manufacturing to services, from unskilled to professional workers. This distinction is explained by the higher number of women working part-time than men, and some women will leave or suspend work to care for children and families. It makes productivity significantly lower, thus reducing the level of income and their wage is not as high as their male colleagues’. According to statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the percentage of female employees is less than 13 percent compared to male workers, and women are more likely to accept part-time work than men. Also, in the same type of work, women’s wages are 16 percent lower than those of men. This rate is investigated in some enterprises, and the number of women working in management and leadership accounts for one third, and in the board, this percentage is only 10 percent.

 

A typical example in Sweden, a Nordic country with much greater policy attention to women and ranking 4th on the world gender equality index, though women hold operating director positions in only 8 out of 269 listed companies. In addition, Sweden is also a country with relatively high employment of women in the world, but the average income of women was still 15 percent less than men.

 

The Government of Vietnam highly assesses the important position as well as the role of women in the social structure. The evidence is that Vietnam has Vietnam Women's Union to defend and protect the rights of women. Also, I know the percentage of women holding key positions in the state apparatus like Parliament, Ministries, and big business is high. This shows the interest and greater support from the government. However, Vietnam is still considered a country whose economy is growing, so there are still some limitations and problems. The Government should focus on promoting programs aimed at raising awareness among people about gender equality and create more jobs for women in rural areas. There should be priority policy for women's participation in economic activities or business establishment.