Building a way through the glass ceiling

Women in real estate are being promoted, are coordinating projects, managing teams in all departments and are rising up the company hierarchies. “Women occupy key managerial positions at Neinver in Poland,” insists Bożena Gierszewska-Mroziewicz, the country head of Poland and Central Europe and asset management director at outlet centre Neinver. “There are thirteen women here, all at different stages of their careers and private lives. Along with following the work code regulations, which we observe without question, we all support each other, since we know and understand the demands of being a mother and a wife,” she explains.

No longer such a minority

Residential and office developer Waryński Holding Group also has something to be proud of, as most of its employees are women. “Half of the management positions are filled by women and the same is true of the board,” points out Anna Lemanowicz, the director of marketing and sales at Waryński Holding, where the vice-chairman of the board is also a woman, Beata Cywińska. “It is hugely important for us to give women a chance and break through the standard set-up to develop in what are typically male occupations. That’s why our women take advantage of the many different ways of expanding their knowledge and gaining experience. They successfully face these challenges and are promoted,” adds Anna Lemanowicz.

Construction company Erbud can also provide some concrete figures in this regard, as 20 pct of its management team comprise women. “They earn 97 pct of what men do, which is not bad because the difference results from the work positions held,” explains Agnieszka Głowacka, the deputy CEO of Erbud, about the firm’s equal treatment policies. At Erbud these have been formalised into the company’s statutes. She goes on to point out that the number of women in construction is growing and at the same time it is, after IT, one of the sectors with the best pay and the most significant lack of skilled labour. “In Scandinavia, nobody is surprised to see women in construction and in technical universities, where there are as many female as there are male students. We are also heading towards such a situation in Poland, when you consider that within a decade we will be short of around a quarter of a million workers in the construction industry. I see no reason for women to turn their backs on such well-paid positions,” she argues.

In any case, in the real estate sector men are already in a minority. “At Prologis, for every 55 people we employ, we hire 35 women – and when it comes to department heads, there are nine women and three men,” reveals Lidia Jesiotr, the people and culture department head of Prologis Poland. “We are a company that supports everybody – and that means in the exact same way. I believe the expectations of men and women are different and it’s very important from the company’s point of view to identify those differences and address them,” she adds.

Schooling for leaders

Keeping up with all the latest changes, in regulations and technology as well as in the market and new trends, requires people who can continue to learn new skills. Education and development programmes require learning soft skills that both help people advance into more senior positions and to manage teams. Do women need such programmes? They certainly do, but no more than men. “At Neinver we don’t have special programmes that support women in their career development,” says Bożena Gierszewska-Mroziewicz. “Each one of our employees can count on our support in many fields – both professional and personal. Your sex is of no consequence. At Neinver, which is an international, multicultural firm, diversity on many levels is something natural,” insists Neinver’s regional head.

Prologis takes the same approach. “The training we offer our employees is for everyone, regardless of their sex,” explains Lidia Jesiotr of Prologis. “Also, the number of places is limited, so we try to divide them equally between men and women. One such course is our Better Up programme for international leaders. A number of women have completed this course across the CEE region as well as in Poland. What they like is that the topics raised on the course are not just professional, but also concern many aspects of people’s private lives. They say that this course has made it easier for them to face the challenges of combining a successful career with a home life,” she points out.

At Prologis, there is also an internal mentoring programme, where workers can choose a mentor from the employees of the company who may even be from another department or country. “At the request of our female colleagues, we have also introduced a job swap programme through which you can get to know how people work in other markets. This allows us to grow internationally without having to move home and without causing any family life upheavals,” claims Lidia Jesiotr.

Development at recruitment

Women these days don’t have to be encouraged to seek promotion. They themselves are showing the initiative and the knowledge needed to achieve such goals. They are also looking for the kind of work that will help them advance their careers. “We are seeing women showing interest in their career development at the job interview stage,” points out Lidia Jesiotr. She also questions the stereotype that younger generations are more assertive in this way. “The age of the candidate does not matter. Any one of us may have the feeling that there is still much to achieve in life,” she points out.

Diversity can be written into a company’s procedures or the question can be approached more intuitively. Much depends on the size of the company and whether it has – for example – an international structure.

“The fact that in our company most workers are women and that they are in management positions isn’t down to some formalised strategy. We choose and promote workers based on their competence,” insists Beata Cywińska. However, the deputy CEO of Waryński Holding believes that there are still too few women in managerial positions. “People are still guilty of stereotyping, often without being aware of it. They are not going to change these proportions, so we have to fight for our positions ourselves. Once determined competent women start appearing in a company, then over time there will be a snowball effect,” claims Beata Cywińska.

Additional procedures can be introduced to effectively prevent discrimination at the recruitment stage. One example is an option that Erbud is considering. “We have many such plans. The HR department is thinking of a system to remove the male and female grammatical forms as well as photographs from CVs. The idea is that in the first phase, the recruiter won’t know and won’t be able to see whether the application is by a man or a woman,” explains Agnieszka Głowacka.

Equal rights and equal importance

We are all equal, but women to a greater degree are still burdened by responsibilities for looking after the children in their families. How is it possible to work and get promoted in a company without missing out on important aspects of family life? Companies have different ways to ensure that the compromises made between an employee’s professional and personal lives are not painful. “I don’t divide my team into two separate camps with different management models,” says Bożena Gierszewska-Mroziewicz. “A person’s professional or business acumen does not depend on their sex – and I can say this with total conviction after many years of management experience, not only in Poland, but also in other European countries. It’s definitely worth remembering that women are often also mothers and have to make the worlds of work and family fit together. This is why mutual support and understanding are important,” she adds.

Flexible hours and the option of working from home are useful in combining family and professional life. “Women are often keen on flexible solutions for their work, although this is also true of men. Everything depends on the particular situation of the person,” points out Beata Cywińska.

Even in an ideal world, it is still women who give birth to children. And the first shared months of maternity are particularly important. Lidia Jesiotr claims that Prologis has procedures in place to support women at those times. “Recently, the company has made maternity leave the same length across all of its departments in the twelve European countries we operate in – and in each one women have 24 weeks of fully-paid maternity leave, which means the company pays extra on top of what each given country guarantees. Their partners are also granted leave after the birth of a child, although it is shorter as they have twelve weeks,” she explains.

And what happens when maternity leave ends and the time comes to return to work, when the job does not always entail sitting at a desk? “At Erbud, we have not only introduced a policy of equal treatment with an anonymous whistleblowing system – which I regard in 2022 to be the standard – but we also offer ways to make it easier to meet the requirements of our profession. Working on building sites means you often have to travel away from where you live as well as irregular working hours and often being tasked to work in difficult conditions. That’s why we offer women returning from maternity leave work in the back office, so that it is easier for them over the first few years to combine their careers with being a mother,” says Agnieszka Głowacka.

Women to the rescue

Women are crucial for the success of many teams, projects and companies. Is this because, as a group, they have different qualities than men? “Women are often gentler in their approach. Cold assessment used to be preferred norm on the building site, as it is in the military, but the pandemic has changed many things. It now turns out that even the hardest taskmaster has to occasionally put their arm around a colleague’s shoulder and assure them that ‘Everything will be ok’, or ask ‘How can I help?’ The context for such relations is now broader – a younger generation is coming onto the job market that is sensitive to the MeToo movement and to questions of mobbing and abuse at work. So the stereotypical female traits of empathy and communication have come to the fore. They are useful on the building site, which relies on and has always depended on teamwork,’ says Agnieszka Głowacka of Erbud.

Beata Cywińska is of much the same view: “We are open to solving problems and not creating them. This is enormously important for a company because it improves both its speed and productivity. Women thus help to push forward the growth of companies and are creative,” says the deputy CEO of Waryński Holding.

Lidia Jesiotr has had similar experiences: “Many women at Prologis manage teams. This seems to me to be very important because women look at many things from a different point of view; they bring a lot of empathy to the table and they bring some much-needed balance to a team,” she says.

Bożena Gierszewska-Mroziewicz, however, has a slightly different point of view: “Just looking at Neinver in Poland, there are more women working as managers than men. but I don’t think this lack of balance has any meaning. Ability has no sex. For me what is important in a manager is the desire to grow, their involvement and their effectiveness. You could talk about women’s so-called ability to multi-task, or the ability of men to organise and lead, but these are stereotypes that often are not borne out by reality,” she argues.

Starting at school

The Perspektywy Education Foundation has, among other initiatives, launched its Dziewczynki na Politechnikach [Girls at Technical University] campaign. In a 2021 report, the foundation stated that women currently make up 35 pct of the students in all the technology colleges in Poland. (By comparison, around 70 pct of all medical students are women.) Delving deeper into the figures, we find that for courses such as architecture, civil engineering and construction, it turns out that women account for around 24 pct to up to 45 pct of students, depending on the college (figures for 2020). It seems that women are already aware of how worthwhile it is to educate themselves for a career in real estate or construction.

Erbud also sees the value in encouraging people to study before they choose their vocation. The company has published a book for young girls who might be interesting in a career in construction entitled ‘Klara Buduje’ [Klara Builds] and in June will be holding a series of construction workshops in the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw. “No one ever made me feel that I became deputy CEO just because I’m a woman,” asserts Agnieszka Głowacka. “Of course, I’ve been subject to some mansplaining on many occasions. That’s a legacy of the macho nature of a business that I joined many years ago. In those days a directors’ meeting was like bathing in a swimming pool full of sharks. Since then the situation has changed. A strong leader is no longer expected to domineer people or shout at them. We have become more civilised, just like in other sectors. The world is changing and so are we. It turns out that women are excellent strategists and construction can sometimes be just like a military training ground. However, I think that technical studies are great and can give people genuine satisfaction when they see the buildings they have helped to construct and which will serve people for many years as the living evidence of all their work. A female engineer will always be able to pass by their own building and proudly say, ‘I did that’. That’s something I’ve always envied about contract and construction managers,” she states.