More Defined Roles Of Women In Family Business: Study

Women have come a long way pushing behind the obstacles and being encouraged to take their stake in business.

Women today are outshining in the field of business by having more defined roles than men. They are coming ahead by not just being an “invisible” unappreciated advisor in family businesses, as mentioned by a report titled ‘Power of Women in Family Business’,

The report made by STEP Project Global Consortium and KPMG Private Enterprise surveyed around 1,800 family businesses from 33 countries. In India, the Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise of the Indian School of Business (ISB) conducted the survey with 53 companies.

Women in a family are always engaged nurturing and taking care of the needs and wants of the family members and keeping a balance in it. This very traditional role of women helps them achieve skills of a leader.

The report says that women occupy 18% of the family business leaders globally, with most of it being from Europe and Central Asia. Women are now furnished with adequate education and are actively coming up as leaders in so-called men dominating industries such as mining, manufacturing and construction.

“Many highly competent women leaders are successfully managing their family businesses in male-dominated industries such as steel and scrap-metal processing, cement manufacturing and the production of hardware products. They have the knowledge, experience and skills in their business and are valued and respected by the employees and customers,” the report reveals.

Due to the government amendments such as Hindu Successions Act in 2005, which mandates property rights to daughters and gender quota for women on corporate boards introduced by the Companies Act (2013), brought out family firms to have higher stakes of women on company boards as compared to the non-family firms.

The report has been co-authored by Nupur Pavan Bang and Yashodhara Basuthakur of the Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise of ISB, Andrea Calabro, director of the STEP Global Academic Director and IPAG Family Business Institute, IPAG Business School and Mary Jo Fedy, Karmen Yeung and Tom McGinness of KPMG.