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FIGURES RELEASED BY the Central Statistics Office (CSO) today show that three in ten (30%) of senior executives in large businesses in Ireland are female.
The research found that small gains have been made in female representation at a senior management level within large businesses over the past two years.
Women now make up 13% of CEOs and 28% of CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) at large companies in Ireland, while the proportion of women represented on boards increased from 20% in 2019 to 22% in 2021.
This is the second time the Central Statistics Office has run a survey asking large businesses of over 250 employees for information on their senior executive team and board of directors. The survey was sent to over 700 businesses across the country.
Commenting on the findings from the survey, Colin Harvey, a statistician from the Central Statistics Office, noted that men hold 87% of CEO positions, down slightly from 89% in 2019.
“Administrative and support services had the highest proportion of female board membership at 33%, while construction had the highest male board membership at 94%,” he noted.
Women made up 30.3% of board membership in the financial and insurance sector, an industry that is historically male-dominated.
Female representation among board chairpersons increased from 7% in 2019 to 14% in 2021.
Women make up an increased number of new appointments to boards. Of the chairpersons who have been on the board for less than a year, 21% were female and 79% male. Among those who had five or more years of experience on the board, 11% were female and 89% male.
The National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) has urged the government to establish a 40% legislative quota for gender balance on non-state boards with “appropriate sanctions” in place for non-compliance.
Emma DeSouza, NWCI women in leadership coordinator, said that the figures show “that the pace of change is too slow. The increases in female representation are extremely limited and marginal with risk of backsliding and regression”.
“That women account for only 13% of CEO’s in Ireland’s large enterprises shows the stark disparity between women and men in decision-making spaces.”
“This is exactly why NWCI is recommending a 40% gender quota for women on publicly-listed company boards. Evidence shows that such measures can have a significant trickle-down effect and it is clear from these figures that Ireland needs real change,” she added.
Rosemary Delaney, the managing editor of Women Mean Business, an online-only magazine dedicated to highlighting the work of businesswomen and female entrepreneurs, said that “it looks as though we are making some ground across senior roles but it’s at such a snail’s pace.”
“Role models are so vital if we are to see more women applying for and securing leadership positions – the adage ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ comes to mind.”
“In the bigger scheme of things, I think it’s vital to see more women in senior leadership roles which should, in turn, lead to more women at the boardroom table.”
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Not enough socialism, apparently.
@P.J. Nolan: essential ingredients of successful durable socialism is a brutally heavy handed military government, fake elections and an elite oligarchy. It never works without those pillars.
@alphanautica: you mean like norway, sweden or finland? Awful kips huh? Thank god we live here.
@Fake Avast: Yeah it was the USA that made Venezuela into an ungovernable socialist hellhole and not the policies of Hugo Chavez as he rots in the ground
Venezuela is AAA-PBP-SF’s role model economy.
This article is clearly as cheap shot at undermining their economic expertise.
@alphanautica: #pearseknowsbest
@Honeybadger197: Corbyn should head over on a mission. Give him a good PA system on the main square, they’d all settle down quite quickly once the hear what he has to say.
@alphanautica: There is virtually no policy in Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto that isn’t already followed in the Nordic states. Try playing another record, the Venezuela analogies are looking every bit as threadbare as Lynton Crosby’s IRA smear campaign.
@Harry Whitehead: you might want to get on to Corbyn so: ‘Chavez showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things’ are his own words coming out of his own megaphone.
All those Corbyn cultists from earlier on should take note that this is his vision of a country that “got socialism right”.
How did we accept austerity so easily? Was it because it mainly dehumanised the poorest & sickest citizens especially Labour and FGs extremely regressive 5 budgets from hell.
Labour you are Still 4-6% in the polls cos u lied to the most vulnerable and caused homelessness ti become the norm for the badly off and people are years now waiting in agony on hospital waiting lists.
No matter what happened in Venezuela it wasn’t these young people’s fault more the fault of older people. If it was my child I’d want them where they were safe which is here.
The Journal goes straight for the click-bait kill as usual. A man wasn’t set alight, he was beating an abandoned state-owned motorbike with a stick, the petrol tank exploded and his clothes caught fire. It was a horrific event, but please don’t resort to lazy journalism for the sake of dramatic headlines
…oh, the unending joys of socialism!
Hopefully Venezuela has an Enda Kenny rising up through the political ranks who can rescue their country from the brink.
As happened in Ireland, we barely escaped the deathly clutches of the hard left, those naive self-convinced loons beset on suffocating economic improvement through hard work and instead wanting to suck an economy dry with their inert socialist begging bowl.
Perhaps there will be Enda Kenny tshirts circulating soon in Venezuela, modelled on Che Guevara, another proud Irishman of principle.
He’s not asking anyone to pay his tuition, the chap was robbed by his government like all the other students who have been robbed of life savings who came here to study. He is highlighting a situation that a lot of Venezuela’s who are here are in. Venezuela is in a dire place and the people are being killed in the streets everyday. They are being starved and robbed. How you can make light of that is beyond me.
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