THE GENDER GAP IN SE EUROPE COUNTRY: Croatia SCHOOL: COTRUGLI Business School
FLEXIBLE FIVE-YEAR
MASTER’S COUNTRY: Brazil
SCHOOL: FGV EAESP, Fundação Getulio Vargas
The Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Sao Paulo School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP) has launched a new flexible pathway to a master’s degree. By engaging in a mix of short certificate courses followed by an applied project, participants can complete the degree in five years. First, they must earn 22 credits in certificates within three and half years. They then have 18 months to undertake and complete an applied project with the assistance of a professor. The certificates cover the broad skills areas of retail, supply chain, people management and finance. Each of these areas have several different certificates within them that students could take, each of which are worth between two to six credits. The initiative is a recognition of current t rends in higher education. One of these being ‘unbundling’ – the breaking down of long programmes into smaller courses. The other is the increasing awareness of the need for lifelong learning – i.e., that in a volatile and technology driven world that changes at a fast pace, professionals must refresh their knowledge constantly to keep up to date with the latest trends. ‘With these convertible certificates, experienced professionals who don’t feel confident about committing to do a master’s in around two years can opt for this certification path, taking much longer and allowing them to show their evolution to the market, until they complete their master’s. In addition, professionals who would like to access state-of-the-art applied academic content without doing a master’s thesis now have an alternative,’ said Gilberto Sarfati, Co-ordinator of the Professional Master’s in Management for Competitiveness at FGV EAESP. To be eligible for the programme, prospective students are required to have a bachelor’s degree and at least five years of experience in the subject area they wish to study. / Ellen Buchan (EB)
It is still possible to find precisely zero female c-suite leaders in a European country’s biggest companies, according to research from COTRUGLI Business School (COTRUGLI). Three countries – Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – yielded female leadership proportions of 0% at the c-suite level, in a study of the 15 largest publicly listed companies in each of the eight southeast European nations. C-suite leadership is where the gender gap in business remains particularly acute throughout Europe. Among EU countries, the average proportion is currently estimated at 19% by the European Women on Boards’ Gender Diversity Index. While one country in the COTRUGLI study – Serbia – exceeded this level comfortably with a 25% proportion, other countries fell beneath the average with 15% and 7% levels found in Croatia and Montenegro, respectively, for example. Female representation on company boards – for which the current EU average currently stands at 35% – underlines how much work there is to do in southeast Europe to address gender inequality. In the COTRUGLI research, only North Macedonia (34%) comes close to the EU average. Results of 18.5% in Slovenia, 17% in Bulgaria and 16.5% in Croatia highlight the current deficit. The question of quotas as one potential solution to the gender gap is raised in the write-up of the study’s results. It makes reference to the European Commission (EC) proposal of enacting a minimum percentage of women in non-executive management positions, of between 33% and 40%, depending on the size and structure of the company. It also points to the power of postgraduate management education, arguing that companies must provide women with opportunities and education to lead confidently and that funding in support of women’s professional education can empower women to reach leadership positions. / Tim Banerjee Dhoul (TBD)
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