Motivations and differences upon reconciling professional and personal life: an empirical study of businesswomen and businessmen in the Valencian Community

According to the last report “Women FTSE 2009” developed by Cranfield School of Management and the IE Business School and sponsored by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, Sainsbury, Enlivens, HSBC and Pearson, the number of European companies with women in positions of executive direction has been reduced from 16 to 15 and the number of women in the board meetings from 39 to 37 has fallen. Moreover, there has been a decrease in the number of total of businesses with women in their counsels, since 1 of each 4 businesses has an exclusively male counsel. The study, reveals a pessimistic panorama for women from the analysis of the number of guidelines that work in the companies that belong to FTSE 100, the British index that includes the 100 main values of the London stock market. The study also reflects a descent in the number of women that occupy key positions in the businesses of the FTSE 100. In the year 2008 there were only 5 women CEOs and 3 regional executive directors. In the 2009 only there were 4 CEOs. The purpose of this article is to see if the origin of this situation is a direct consequence of businesswomen confronting more difficulties than the businessmen upon putting in common its professional and personal life or if by contrast this corresponds to an stereotyped perception of gender inequality. With this end we conducted a study using a sample of businesswomen and men with experience analyzing its motivations to create business, difficulties that they find, and the solutions to improve the conciliation of its professional and personal lives. The results show that there are no significant gender differences in the motivations, regardless of who the head of the family is (bearing main responsibility for the house and children). On the other hand, we show that businesswomen diverge from businessmen in the perception of motivations and challenges they have. Indeed, businessmen agree with businesswomen in the motivations and difficulties that these have, and consider that they give to them more importance than women themselves.