Only a fifth of the management positions in the Canary Islands are women. This has been advanced by the Ministry of Economy, Knowledge and Employment, through Proexca, who commissioned the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to carry out a research study to analyze the number of women and men who hold positions of managerial responsibility in internationalized companies .

This is one of the conclusions of the analysis on the difference between the sexes in the managerial positions of Canarian companies that have international activity is that only 20.3% are occupied by women. In addition, their distribution in the group of templates is very unequal, since of all the companies registered in the Mercantile Registry with some international activity, 60.2% do not have any woman on their board of directors.

The study has consulted 1,590 exporting or importing companies that appear in the Mercantile Registry of the Canary Islands and a more specific questionnaire to 153 internationalized companies or with potential for it. From this survey, the working group concluded that only one in five managers is a woman, with small differences depending on their activity. Thus, in exporting companies the percentage is 20.3%, while in non-exporting companies the percentage rises slightly, to 21.6%.

By sectors, real estate activity stands out, where 53.3% are women, compared to construction or professional activities, where their representation is around 11%. Regarding the specific questionnaire carried out with a smaller group of companies, the analysis concludes that the larger the company, the more representation women lose, which means that men work to a greater extent in companies with turnover around to 375,000 euros per year, while in the female case it is around 250,000.

Regarding internationalization decision-making, women make them in 64.3% of the cases in the manufacturing industry, in 40% in the agricultural sector and in 39.3% of the cases in the services sector. ,

The study also analyzes the governance structure of companies and highlights that in those where women are the ones who decide on internationalization issues, the average size of the board of directors is 3.3 people, while in the male case it amounts to 5. ,6.

The coordinator of the work, Antonia García, concluded that "the different representation by sex is evident, so it is advisable to carry out an even greater and more continuous follow-up, to locate and examine the factors that condition female performance in business internationalization, to encourage their participation.

The director of the area, Elena Máñez, has highlighted "the importance of having scientific evidence that makes it possible to make visible the scarce presence of women in leadership and management positions, despite having women trained in our universities with sufficient capacity to make decisions necessary for the progress of their businesses and achieve excellence.

The minister was thus referring to the data contained in the latest report from the Canary Islands Employment Observatory on the situation of women in the labor market. According to this document, in the general context of the Canary Islands, women do not reach 36% of leadership and managerial positions.

The salary gap is only 2.4% in those positions, but it skyrockets above 24% in those with the lowest salaries, "we see the enormous social impact of the underrepresentation of half of the population in the best paid positions" Manez said.