Russians More Opposed than Other Nations to Having Women in Top Corporate Posts, Survey Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 4 – In a new poll conducted by GlobalNR and the Romir agency, Russians more than members of other nations are more opposed to the idea of increasing the number of women in leading positions but only by a relatively small percentage (capost.media/news/obshchestvo/rossiyane-negativnee-vsekh-v-mire-otneslis-k-rostu-doli-zhenshchin-v-rukovodstve/).

            Asked whether women should be more often represented in the leaderships of corporations, seven percent of Russians said they completely disagreed. Among Americans, Germans and Koreans, that figure was three percent, and in all the rest between one and two percent, the survey found.

Another 14 percent of Russians said they generally disagreed with the idea, as did 12 percent of the Koreans, and two to eight percent of those questioned in the other countries. But 46 percent of Russians said they were neutral on the issue, the highest share of any nation in this study.

Twenty-three percent of Russians surveyed said they generally agreed with having more women in corporate leaderships, with 10 percent saying they completely supported that development. In Brazil, 62 percent of the sample agreed completely, and in Thailand, 38 percent. But for the world as a whole, 60 percent generally or completely favored the idea.

Roughly a third of those surveyed around the world said they believed that the top person in a corporation should be a man, with the share of Russians doing so being only two percentage points higher. Eight percent of Russians disagreed with the idea that there should be more men in these positions, a figure in the middle of the range of national answers.

In reporting these findings, Andrey Milekhin, head of the Romir group, said that Russia is relatively close to the rest of the world as far as its attitudes toward gender roles in corporate leadership. This survey follows a Deloite study which found in Russia, women are 4.5 times more likely to be corporate leaders that their counterparts in other countries.

But the accounting firm said that in Russia, women leaders are overwhelmingly concentrated in smaller companies. The larger the Russian corporation, it said, the fewer women are present. That pattern too is not dissimilar from conditions in most other countries