The Glass Ceiling in European Corporate Boards

Annalisa Gigante's destiny is peculiar. A woman manager with a distinguished international career, Ms Gigante has become the European champion for the promotion of women to top company positions. Vice-president of the European Professional Women's Network (PWN), she is the author of Women on Board: Moving Mountains. Forty-two years old, she has just become Head of Marketing and Development at Adecco, but when you read her book it appears that she is just the exception that confirms the rule.

Italian by birth, she went to secondary school in Brussels, graduated from Cambridge, and took an MBA from SDA Bocconi School of Management: "At SDA, it was a big change for me getting used to a way of studying that was different from the Anglo-Saxon method. It was based much more on lessons in class than on individual work," she says. She then began a career around Europe and the world, moving from Monsanto to the European Union, where she worked on a project in the Agricultural Division regarding organic farming. Next she came to Milan to work in consultancy, on internationalization strategies for Italian clients. Then back to Brussels "on a joint venture between Monsanto and Exxon for which I became marketing manager. Then, in 1998, I went back to the Monsanto head office to work on strategies for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It was at that point that I started to join professional women's networks, in order to share experiences. There were really very few women working in the chemical sector."

In 2000, Annalisa Gigante was hired by Manpower as Worldwide Strategy and Development Manager, a job that made her travel continuously between Milwaukee, Paris and Brussels: "I know the airports better than the cities," she jokes, remembering those hectic years. "In 2004, after the birth of my daughter, I decided to take a two-year sabbatical and I kept in touch by holding conferences and contributing to the expansion of the European Professional Women's Network." In 2006, she went back to work as Vice-President for Marketing and New Product Launch at Royal DSM, a company based in Maastricht specializing in life and material sciences.

Between board meetings and business trips, Annalisa Gigante found the time to write a book, together with a colleague, on behalf of the European PWN, which, backed by indisputable evidence, highlights the under-representation of women on the boards of directors of major European companies. "I realized that people talk about this problem a lot but, especially in Italy, there aren't many actual figures that can be worked with. The aim of this book is to provide the cold reality of numbers," she explains. "By analyzing about 300 of the biggest European companies together with Egon Zehnder and BoardEx, we found that women are just 9.7% of board members, an improvement with respect to 8.5% registered two years before, but a figure which is still considerably lower than that of the US, where women make up 15% of the people sitting on boards of directors."