Mauritius Inc. - A serious case of gender hypocrisy?

Last year, around this time, I saw a post by one of my LinkedIn contacts proudly acknowledging the "valuable contribution of women who are very impactful in the company". The post was a picture of six employees in his company, the Head of Finance, an Assistant Comm. & Event Coordinator, an Assistant Manager, an Interior Designer, a Business Development Executive and a Receptionist. Nothing about senior leadership or board membership. When I checked, I found that his board consisted of six male directors out of seven board members. A few months earlier, my wife was approached to sit on the board of a regulated company that was being set up in Mauritius. I came to understand that the reason was compliance with the legal requirement in Mauritius to have at least one female director on the board. These and other similar events got me thinking about how we really saw women in the field of business in Mauritius.

Like in many other countries, there is a perplexing relationship between business and gender in Mauritius. More women than men in the country get university qualifications, and the same proportion of university-educated women as men enter the job market, and hiring of women in the private sector does not lag behind that of men. Nevertheless, just 5% of senior executives in Mauritius Inc are women. Why are so few women managing to rise to the very top of Mauritian businesses?

Hiring doesn’t explain everything

Although in terms of getting hired in private companies women don’t fall that much behind men, that fact hides a problem. Research has shown that women in the private sector tend to get clustered within support and administrative roles within companies, with men dominating the business and strategically oriented aspects of the organization. This means that few women make it to the top in larger organizations, pigeon-holed in middle and junior management positions. Women tend to rise to the top only in small companies with less than 25 employees, the bulk of them family-owned concerns where the barriers to females taking over the helm of the family business are less limiting.

So where do most of the highly qualified women coming on the job market go? Here is an interesting fact: unlike the poor representation of women at the top in the private sector, in the public sector, the numbers are much better with women making up 39.7% of the most senior positions in government, with the country having just got its first female Chief Justice. According to the World Bank, although hiring across gender does not differ much in the public sector, women are more likely to have higher qualifications and high-skilled jobs making up 2.5% of managers, 30% of professionals and 26.4% of technicians in public service. What this suggests is that highly-qualified women in the Mauritian job market are more likely to go into the public sector than into Mauritius Inc. However even in the parastatal bodies, board seats tend to be earmarked for the predominantly male supporters and other professionals.

Public not private

Why higher-qualified women tend to choose the public sector is not hard to see. Public sector organizations are more likely to implement gender equality legislation and their promotion practices are less likely to be the subject of individual judgement and biases making it easier for women to be promoted to the top as the data suggests. Another factor is the wage gap between men and women is smaller at the top rung of the public sector at 25% as compared to 36.5% in the private sector. Not only is it easier for women to rise to the top in the public sector, but the wage gap is also smaller as compared to their male colleagues.

It is also an attitude problem within Mauritius Inc. Let us take an example; in a survey back in 2000, a meagre 28.4% of Mauritian CEOs saw sexual harassment and the difficulty of women to balance work and child care as ‘serious’ issues. And a mere 19.7% of CEOs saw their female employees having difficulties arranging for childcare as a major issue. This attitude is a major problem in a country where 68% of Mauritians see taking care of the home and children as the woman’s responsibility and women spend an average of 20% of their day doing household chores.

Just how little things have changed since then can be seen in the fact that in 2019 half of private sector companies in a study said they had no proper gender equality policy aside from what is legally required and only 41% said they had a maternity leave policy and even fewer, 14%, took into account child-care needs of their female employees. This only further reinforces the preference of higher-qualified women to look to the public sector where only a quarter of women work 40 hours or more a week, whereas half of women in the private sector are expected to put in those many hours. This blind spot within Mauritius Inc will only further aggravate the problem if we keep in mind that due to the stresses caused by Covid-19, a study by Mckinsey suggests that globally women feel more burned out compared to men and with one in three women looking to either quit or downshift their career.

More women equal more profit

For private companies failing to allow more women to rise to the top of their organizations, comes at a substantial opportunity cost as data across different countries suggest. A 2015 study found that companies with more women on their boards had a 36% better return on equity compared to companies with little or no gender diversity. This finding was supported by another study in 2016 that looked at 22,000 companies across 91 countries and came to a similar conclusion. In 2018 Mckinsey found that companies without gender diversity were 29% less likely to get above average profits. The reasons for this are that companies that include more women at the top are less likely to fall prey to groupthink or echo chambers, have a diversity of opinions and tend to be more favourably looked upon by their customers and regulators.

The real question is how to get Mauritius Inc to open itself up more to female talent and leadership? In 2012, out of the 403 seats on boards available at 42 public-listed companies in Mauritius, 97% were occupied by men. A far cry from international companies such as American Express which "boasts" of a board which is 20% female. The answer is: this can only come from a willing change within Mauritius Inc itself and cannot simply be forced from outside.

The Tokenism trap

There are generally two ways in which female leadership with businesses have been boosted elsewhere. The first is through the state, but this tends to be limited unless backed up by a cultural shift within business itself. In Norway in 2008, the government made it a legal obligation for publicly listed companies to have at least 40% of their board made up of women. The result was that shortly after companies announced their new female directors, they lost value with the market reacting by expecting that such nominations to the top were done not on merit but simply to comply with legal regulations. Or, more worryingly, that in looking to fulfil such a quota, companies had side-lined more qualified potential leadership to live up to the quota.

A year earlier, Spanish companies avoided falling into this ‘token trap’ because although the government encouraged boards to have 40% women, they did not make it legally binding, and the companies who were hiring women on their boards also boosted the hiring and promotion of women in other senior management positions as well. The market did not react negatively because unlike what happened in Norway, it was clear that Spanish companies were not simply trying to follow the law but genuinely wanted to boost qualified women to the top.

Another example is what happened in Singapore when the government extended maternity leave in private companies from eight to sixteen weeks. Although cited as a boon for women in the workplace, few women actually took the full sixteen weeks because of the fear that their employers might not like it, which might affect their promotion prospects later on. If companies themselves are not convinced of the need for change, little actually changes.

The other is through the way in which the private sector itself changes. This can be in one of two approaches. For the first, we can look at Japan where a 2014 study showed that the rise of women to the top of Japanese businesses was helped along after foreign businesses started opening up in Japan or buying up Japanese firms, bringing a new openness to hiring female leaders as compared to traditional Japanese businesses. Particularly in large companies such as Nissan where the number of female managers jumped up four-fold after foreign partners moved in. The second way is where female leaders emerge in sectors already dominated by women. A 2015 publication from IZA found that globally the garment industry has the highest proportion of female CEOs (29%). That’s because 51% of owners of the global garment business are also female.

This article is not meant to provide a comprehensive solution to the problem but one aimed at helping all of us, men and women, become more aware of the issues. Reforms will have to start from the grass root level within each household through a gender cultural shift, with the education system, starting and promoting meaningful conversations in the workplace focused on merits, respect, diversity and inclusion, breaking through the short-sighted egos of some decision makers. I only touched on some issues that came to mind but I am sure there are extensively more. In the end, I believe that for Mauritius Inc to resolve its gender problem, Mauritius Inc itself will have to change. The change starts with me, you, each of us.

Swadeck Taher OSK is a Chartered Accountant (ICAEW) and a Chartered Marketer (CIM) running businesses and coaching, consulting, mentoring CEOs and entrepreneurs ranging from startups through family businesses to established top 100 companies in Mauritius. He enjoys sharing the expertise he developed over the last thirty years at senior leadership/directorship level with his clients, business partners and other budding entrepreneurs.

Swadeck is also a GTD Practitioner and a Certified GTD Trainer. He helps others experience what the Productive Experience feels like and how they too can savour stress free productivity.

Sakeenah Co Ltd is the only Certified International Partner of the David Allen Company in Mauritius.

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