Kenyans are busy hounding the public sector because it does not have enough women in leadership positions, but the situation is much the same in the private sector.
Only four in 62, or a meagre six percent, of chief executive officers or managing directors of companies listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange are women. And only three, or five percent, of these firms have women as chair of their boards of directors.
The overall representation of women in boards and senior executive posts is also tipped in favour of men. One in four (23 percent) members of boards of directors is a woman, translating to about 126 of the 550 members in the 62 companies.
Of the businesses that reported on the composition of their senior management, slightly more than a quarter are women, compared with more than three-quarters who are men. Senior managers refer to CEOs or managing directors and the tier of leadership just below them. Fifty-two firms provided information on their top executives, totaling 143 female and 392 male managers.
The women at the helm of the listed companies include the managing director and chief executive officer of KenGen, Rebecca Miano, who has served in the post for about one year, and BOC Kenya managing director, Marion Gathoga-Mwangi, who has steered the company since mid this year.
The three female chairs of board of directors are Anne Mutahi, who heads the board of Standard Chartered Bank, Isabella Ocholla-Wilson (Unga Group), and Lucy Waguthi (Eveready East Africa).
The small number of women heading companies is not unique to Kenya, with only 24 of the US Fortune 500 companies having women CEOs or managing directors. This was a decline of a quarter from 32 in 2017. The Fortune 500 is an annual list of 500 of the largest US companies compiled and published by Fortune magazine.
Globally, Asia and Australia have one in eight (12 percent) CEOs who are women, compared with Europe and the Americas (eight percent), according to a study by IRC Global Executive Search Partner.
Only 18 of the 52 Kenyan listed companies had at least a third of their senior management who are women. Of these companies, four are in the commercial and services sector and three in banking, insurance and manufacturing and allied sectors each. The energy and petroleum, and investment sectors had two companies each while real estate investment had one.
Stanlib Fahari, in the real estate investment trust sector, is the only firm that had all of the senior management staff (five) who are women. It is a fund under STANLIB Kenya, with an estimated market value of about Sh1.94 billion as at December last year, which is about 600 times smaller than Safaricom’s value of Sh1.2 trillion.
Half of the senior managers at Kenya Airways are women, making it the leader in gender representation in senior leadership among listed large corporations, and second overall. The other companies that have achieved gender parity in senior management are TransCentury, Express Kenya and Home Afrika.
Four companies — Crown Berger, EA Portland Cement, Kakuzi and Williamson Tea Kenya — have no women in senior management. Nine other companies — National Bank of Kenya, Kenya Power and Lighting Company, Equity Group Holdings, Co-operative Bank of Kenya, Nation Media Group, Sameer Africa, KenGen, EA Cables and Uchumi Supermarkets Ltd — have a women representation rate of less than 15 percent in top management.