Labor: It’s a man’s world

Hungary’s job market is male-centric – an often-heard statement that has just been confirmed by a recently published Randstad survey. According to the latest Randstad Workmonitor, which involved questioning nearly 3,000 employees and employers in Hungary , 61% of men queried have male superiors, and 46% of women work with male bosses.

Still, almost half of the women questioned said they preferred working with a male manager than a female. Altogether, 48% of men and women said they would work with male superiors if they had a choice. When asked about working with female bosses, only 23% of women and 20% of men said they would want to work with them.

When it comes to choosing colleagues, 54% of women said they preferred working with men, and only 27% fancied the idea of sharing an office with female co-workers. Men also favor male colleagues – 41% would work with men and 33% with women.

When the survey addressed the issue of a balanced male-female ratio at workplaces, it turned out that neither employees nor employers think a healthy balance was important. Only 27% said that a company could perform better if it employed the same number of men and women, while 80% think that when an employer wants to hire a new executive, the number of men and women in management is not an issue to consider.

“Employers are paying less attention to gender issues; the choice is based on performance and the professional experience of the candidates, regardless of their gender,” Erika Sinka of Randstad said. “If a woman applies for a top management position and she is perfectly qualified for the post, she is usually hired, as employers won’t wait for a male candidate.”

Accordingly, the result of the survey shows that more than half of those questioned disagreed with the statement that “if a man and a woman with equal qualification apply for a job, the man is more likely to get hired”.

But it seems that male dominance in the workplace is here to stay at least for a while: 81% of men and 74% of women think that work performance would not improve if the number of women was increased at a company.