Ten men and not a single woman – this is the management team at Krefeld based pet supplies retailer Fressnapf, which had a turnover of around 4 billion euros last year and, together with its franchise partners, employs around 18,000 people. In a ranking compiled by the German-Swedish Allbright Foundation, the group ranks first among the German family businesses with the highest turnover and large, all-male management teams. In second place is the Schwarz Group, operator of the Lidl and Kaufland retail chains, with nine men. There are also eight men and no women on the management board of the metal processing technology provider Diehl, which therefore comes in third place in the negative rankings.

In general the situation for women in Germany's family business landscape does not look quite so bleak. The proportion of female members on the management boards of the 100 largest companies has risen by 4 percentage points to 12.6% over the past two years, according to the non-profit foundation's report. However, compared to the 160 companies in the Dax, MDax and SDax, where the proportion of women on the management boards recently averaged 19.6%, there is still some catching up to do.

The report authors attribute the higher level of diversity in listed companies to the strict transparency obligations and the greater influence of non-family stakeholders. The „traditional” private family businesses, on the other hand, have so far found it difficult to get more women into management – “whether in active management or on supervisory bodies“, explain Allbright managing directors Wiebke Ankersen and Christian Berg.

The fact that there are not enough female familydescendants for the operational management of the companies can hardly be used as a justification. This is because almost all of the 129 new management members recruited in the period under review were salaried managers, while only five came from the owner families. „Family businesses essentially draw their management personnel from the same pool as listed companies,“ the report states.

At the same time, family businesses had almost as many opportunities to appoint women to the management board as listed companies during the period under review. The proportion of management members who left the family businesses surveyed was 26%, compared to 30% in listed companies. This does not support the assumption that the management structures of family businesses are particularly stable. However, the companies had at least made better use of their opportunities for new appointments, and increased the proportion of women recruited from 12% to 23%. Almost one in four new management members in family businesses was therefore a woman.

Looking to the future, the report predicts that there will be even more opportunities to fill management bodies with more diverse members. Almost half of all family businesses in Germany are currently facing a generational change. „They all want (…) to have the most capable people on the management board – and that naturally includes women,” say Ankersen and Berg. According to the authors, however, it is likely to be “very difficult for the aforementioned companies with large, all-male management teams to attract talented female managers to their top management“.