Female Leadership in Russian Private and Public Sector: Similarities and Differences

Gender equality and the involvement of both sexes in decision-making processes is a sine qua non for any democratic structure (Ballington, 1998; Welzel, 2002; Fish, 2002; Richards & Gelleny, 2007; Piccone, 2017). Despite significant improvements in equal power distribution, females remain underrepresented in leadership positions in politics and business across the globe and particularly in Russia (Pande & Ford, 2012). Russian women tend to contribute to the decision-making processes but actually do not participate directly in it. The proportion of female “specialists” involved in the preparation of information, documentation, accounting and maintenance in the political sphere is 88%. However, there is a fairly low representation of women at high levels of government. The Russian Federation has 130th place in the ranking of countries in terms of women’s representation in national parliaments, having only 16.5% of women there (Women in national parliaments, 2020). The situation is similar in the Russian private sector. Currently, 34.6% of business owners in Russia are women (Mastercard Index of Women Entrepreneurs, 2018). Such indicators are relatively high, as Russia has the 2nd place in the Ranking for Women Business Ownership (Ibid). Nevertheless, women often manage a firm well until there are no more than 100-200 people in it (Gorelova, 2017). It leads to the fact that the share of female CEOs in the structures of a large business is only 6.4% (РБК, 2019). The main research aim is to identify the main reasons affecting the female leadership in the analyzed segments and to form the proposals on how to reduce gender asymmetry in the analyzed segments. This study applies Feminist Institutionalism which considers gender balance as a feature of the institution and social structures (Walby, 1990). It focuses on the relationship between institutions and actors to eliminate gender misbalance (Chappell, 2010). From the empirical perspective, research is based on semi-structured interviews with public and business female leaders. It has been concluded that the low level of female politicians’ representation at the highest level of public institutions is a restrictive factor that characterizes Russian as the non-democratic state because of gender misbalance in the political sphere. The gender imbalance in the private sector in Russia has a small or no influence on its institutional development.