Rethinking the glass-ceiling for female employees in the Balkans

As a gender issues “junkie”, I have recently sparked a few interesting coffee shop conversations on why women in the Balkans (and elsewhere, I am sure) do not get promoted into senior positions in their work places as often as men do. While nobody denies the gap, many people argue that both supply and demand factors influence it. In this post, I ignore the presence of direct discrimination at a workplace and focus on the more subtle reasons which could explain the glass-ceiling phenomenon. 

The supply side argument of the debate is that women do not want senior positions because they have family responsibilities and thus do not want to have to stay at work late or travel frequently. There is a logical inconsistency between “not wanting to get promoted” and “having family responsibilities”. I wonder if Balkan women would become more interested in getting promoted if their significant others were better at sharing family responsibilities.

The second argument from the supply camp is that women suffer from lower self-confidence than men, underestimate their own abilities and skill levels and therefore do not actively seek opportunities for promotion. Fair enough, I say, without wanting to get into the psychological nitty-gritty of why this could be the case.

Let us now move to the demand side of the discussion. My more honest interlocutors (from the employers’ camp) “admitted” that they highly value women as middle management, because of their great sense of responsibility and meticulousness. However, when it comes to senior positions, they find it difficult to promote women. Their clients expect to be able to call a company director at 9pm to ask about something, they expect to be able to go for dinners, drinks, to be entertained... Most women, again apparently due to family responsibilities, are unable to “keep up the pace” with such social demands (with all these families and small children arguments, who would have ever thought that in reality the birth-to-death ratio is negative across the Balkans). 

Following these discussions, I started thinking about the nature of such social demands and the sexual prism women tend to be observed through, as well as the highly sexualised connotations of female-male interactions in the Balkan work environment. To clarify, I am not saying that this is only the case in the Balkans, but the fact that senior management is dominated by men certainly makes it a lot more awkward for the very few professional women “enjoying” their company. The discomfort some professional women experience in such situations should not be underestimated (the fact that their significant others have a problem with their socialisation does not help either).

Therefore, the root of the glass-ceiling problem often goes a lot deeper than whether women want to pick up their phones at 9pm. It is essentially about succumbing to the rules of the game in a man’s world, because in most scenarios, a man decides whether a woman gets promoted.

God bless the many exceptions to this rule!