German family businesses slow to appoint women to top jobs

Women remain heavily under-represented in the top ranks of Germany's family-owned businesses, according to a study.

The non-profit Allbright Foundation, which works to boost women and diversity in senior positions, found that women accounted for just 13% of executives at Germany's 100 largest family-owned companies by revenue at the beginning of March.

Compared with the same date two years earlier, the share had increased by just 0.4 percentage points.

The study also found that companies had increasingly recruited men in the meantime, with women accounting for only 17% of new appointments to the management boards of family-owned businesses.

"We are currently seeing a full stop in efforts to increase the proportion of women in management boards across German companies as a whole," Allbright Foundation managing directors Wiebke Ankersen and Christian Berg said.

For family-owned companies, this is a particular problem because progress had barely begun before it started to stall, they said.

Companies now needed to invest in the best talent and in the consideration of different perspectives in leadership, they added.

The study's authors said family-owned companies were also falling short regarding digitization, business models and the composition of leadership teams.

According to the study, corporate transparency and the influence of external actors outside the owning families had a clear impact on the share of women in management.

Twenty of the 100 largest family-owned companies are listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, while a significant share of their stock remains family owned. They include BMW, Continental, Henkel and Merck.

At those companies, women accounted for 19.8% of management board members, roughly in line with the average for all listed companies.

Among non-listed family-owned businesses, the share of women in top management stood at 11.1%.