Beáta Nagy

Gendered management in Hungary: perceptions and explanations

Purpose – To display both the statistical data and the subjective evaluation on the situation of women in management in Hungary.Design/methodology/approach – In the last ten years research activity on gender and work countries have concentrated on the investigation of the sociological issue of the extent to which equal opportunity programmes at the company level have been accomplished in Hungary. The investigations consist of two interrelated parts: questionnaires on womens situation in top management completed by HR departments, and in‐depth interviews with employees. This paper brings together these studies and reports on womens management position at senior levels in Hungarian organisations.Findings – The results show that, although womens share in the elite pool of economic life increased, women are badly represented in higher managerial positions. Neither employers nor employees find this situation problematic, and continuously emphasised the liberal meaning of equality. There were various ideas a...

The evaluation of male and female managers at a local municipality in Hungary

Purpose – The study sets out to examine how male and female managers in general and male and female municipal executives in particular are evaluated by the members of the organisation.Design/methodology/approach – The study presented used the methodology of focus group discussion.Findings – The results show that employees clearly had different expectations regarding the characteristics of male and female executives. The most negative image of female executives emerged in the group of men. However, even female office managers tended to mention numerous negative features of women executives, and seemed to prefer men in executive positions.Research limitations/implications – The research involved four focus group sessions at the municipality in the autumn of 2004, consequently the research results cannot be generalised.Originality/value – This paper contributes to the limited number of academic literature on female executives in Hungary, and explores the deep prejudices against women in leading positions.

Women in Management: The Hungarian Case

Although a transformation process has been underway for 20 years in the post-socialist countries, gender inequalities persist, including the under-representation of women in management and other political and economic leadership positions. The promotion of gender equality was among the top policy priorities under socialism in the 1970s, but it was a top-down simplistic process without a deep understanding of the underlying social mechanisms causing gender inequality (Bankone Vas, 1981; Gal and Kligman, 2000).In the socialist period, the country underwent a process of forced emancipation led by the political decision-making bodies, which was not supported by the citizens, and therefore lacked widespread acceptance or genuine engagement.

Exploring Gender Culture at a Telecommunications Company

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to interpret the expectations, the norms and values related to gender within the concept of organizational culture. Over the past decades, organizational researches have paid great attention to cultural research and feminist theories have increasingly examined organizations from the angle of gender. The research the authors conducted in a business organization attempts to link these two areas. Design/methodology/approach – The authors used the focus group discussion method at a telecommunications company in the spring of 2011 in central Hungary. Findings – The employees interviewed made a sharp distinction between professional and managerial competencies of female managers, accepting the former and often questioning the latter. Female managers met with lack of understanding and reserve if they returned to work when their children were still very young – not a common practice in Hungarian society – or if they worked in a top managerial position. Research limitations/i...

The Downturn of Gender Diversity on Boards in Hungary

Hungary, similarly to other post-socialist countries, does not regulate the gender diversity of companies, and this leads to women’s serious underrepresentation on corporate boards. The historical aversion to central regulation of social matters derives from the legacy of forced emancipation in the socialist period. This chapter discusses the contradictory impact of forced emancipation in Hungary and the limited probability of introducing legal regulations regarding gender diversity. It gives a thorough overview of present legal regulations, contains statistical data on gender representation on company boards and also includes an expert interview on the possible solutions to increase women’s participation. The research findings show that the socialist state prioritised women’s emancipation, many institutions were established to facilitate women’s full-time labour force participation and the figure of female managers was well-known. However, socialism lost its positive connotations in public discourse shortly after the system change, and delegitimised the issues connected to gender equality in political and policy fields. Consequently, the unsupportive social environment and the conservative turn in the Hungarian gender culture have not encouraged any changes in the legal framework. Moreover, the expert interviewee questions the importance and utility of legal regulations. At present, the most influential way to spread gender equality remains the internationalisation of companies: EU-driven policy and legal frames and multinational companies might promote gender equality in management and on corporate boards.

Work-to-family spillover: Gender differences in Hungary

It is crucial to understand the role that labor market positions might play in creating gender differences in work–life balance. One theoretical approach to understanding this relationship is the spillover theory. The spillover theory argues that an individual’s life domains are integrated; meaning that well-being can be transmitted between life domains. Based on data collected in Hungary in 2014, this paper shows that work-to-family spillover does not affect both genders the same way. The effect of work on family life tends to be more negative for women than for men. Two explanations have been formulated in order to understand this gender inequality. According to the findings of the analysis, gender is conditionally independent of spillover if financial status and flexibility of work are also incorporated into the analysis. This means that the relative disadvantage for women in terms of spillover can be attributed to their lower financial status and their relatively low access to flexible jobs. In other words, the gender inequalities in work-to-family spillover are deeply affected by individual labor market positions. The observation of the labor market’s effect on work–life balance is especially important in Hungary since Hungary has one of the least flexible labor arrangements in Europe. A marginal log-linear model, which is a method for categorical multivariate analysis, has been applied in this analysis.

The Timing of Motherhood While Earning a PhD in Engineering

In spite of tremendous efforts, women are still under-represented in the field of science. Post-graduate education and early tenure track employment are part of the academic career establish-ment in research and development during periods that usually overlap with family formation. Though women tend to leave science mainly after obtaining their PhD, and the timing of mother-hood plays a vital role in a successful research career, qualitative data on this life period are scarce. Our paper focuses on how the normative and institutional contexts shape female PhD engineering students’ family plans. The research was based on intersections of life course and risk and uncertainty theories. Using qualitative interviews we explored how contradicting social norms of childbearing cause tensions in postgraduate students’ lives, and how the different uncer-tainties and risks permeate young researchers’ decisions on early life events. We concluded that, despite the general pattern of delaying motherhood among higher educated women, these students struggle against this postponement, and they hardly have any good options to avoid risk stem-ming from uncertainties and from some characteris-tics of studying and working in engineering. Find-ings of this research may call the attention of stake-holders to possible intervention points.

“An Ebbing Tide Lowers All Boats”: How the Great Recession of 2008 Affected Men and Women in Central and Eastern Europe

In this paper we explore the impact of the economic recession of 2008 on gender inequality in the labor force in Central and Eastern European countries. We argue that job and occupational segregation protected women’s employment more than mens in the CEE region as well, but unlike in more developed capitalist economies, women’s level of labor force participation declined and their rates of poverty increased during the crisis years. We also explore gender differences in opinions on the impact of the recession on people’s job satisfaction. For our analysis we use published data from EUROSTAT and our own calculations from EU SILC and ESS 2010.

Geschlechterspezifische Auswirkungen der Arbeitsmarktpolitik in der Tschechischen Republik, Ungarn und Slowenien

Die Wirtschaftsreformen in Mittel- und Osteuropa (MOE) am Anfang der 1990er, die Mitgliedschaft in der EU und der Einfluss der Globalisierung hatten betrachtliche Auswirkungen auf die Arbeitsmarksituation der Frauen. Diese Veranderungen fanden in Gesellschaften statt, in denen die bezahlte Beschaftigung von Frauen und deren langjahrige und daher unbestrittene Beteiligung am Arbeitsmarkt seit mehreren Nachkriegsgenerationen etabliert waren. Trotz der Gleichstellungserklarungen und der Ziele der Frauenemanzipation wahrend der staatssozialistischen Herrschaft wurden Frauen in den MOE-Landern auf dem Arbeitsmarkt im Allgemeinen als Arbeitskrafte zweiter Kategorie angesehen; sie wurden schlecht bezahlt und stark auf bestimmte Bereiche und Tatigkeiten beschrankt (Cermakova 1995; Fodor 2002; Pollert 2003). Das war zum Teil auf die privilegierte Position der Schwerindustrie und zum Teil auf die sich nicht erfullende Annahme zuruckzufuhren, dass ein gut ausgebautes Netz offentlicher Dienstleistungen Frauen von der Doppelbelastung aus unbezahlter Hausarbeit und bezahlter Beschaftigung befreien wurde. Geschlechterungleichheiten wurden wahrend dieser Zeit weder erkannt noch bekampft, und die so genannte Emanzipation fuhrte zu einer noch groseren Belastung der arbeitenden Frauen. Trotz der Bemuhungen der sozialistischen Parteien, die Beschaftigung von Frauen zu fordern, wurde die Verantwortung der Manner nie diskutiert. Der Widerspruch zwischen dem propagierten Ideal und der Realitat der Frauenpolitik war in allen postsozialistischen Landern augenscheinlich (Gal/ Kligman, 2000).

Weibliche Führungskräfte in der ungarischen Planwirtschaft und beim Übergang zur Marktwirtschaft

Trotz einer sehr hohen Frauenerwerbsquote waren in den sozialistischen Landern Frauen in den Macht- und Fuhrungspositionen von Wirtschaft, offentlicher Verwaltung, Wissenschaft und Politik, ahnlich wie auch in den meisten westlichen Industrielandern, stark unterreprasentiert. Die zustandigen Partei- und Regierungsgremien haben dieses Defizit nicht nur erkannt und offen diskutiert, sondern auch durch diverse Masnahmen zu verringern versucht. In Ungarn hat z. B. eine Stellungnahme des Zentralkomitees der Ungarischen Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei uber die politische, wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage der Frauen vom Februar 1970 die Benachteiligung von qualifizierten Frauen bei der Besetzung von Fuhrungspositionen beklagt und eine Erhohung des Frauenanteils unter den Fuhrungskraften gefordert, was auch zu einem Regierungsbeschlus gefuhrt (Nőpolitikai Dokumentumok K, 1981, 12, 35) und in den folgenden Jahren zu einer starkeren Berucksichtigung von Frauen auf den mittleren und unteren Leitungsebenen beigetragen hat (Nőpolitikai Dokumentumok K, 1981, 147).