The proportion of women at the highest levels of corporate decision-making is very low — that was the central observation of Anita Csoma, a lecturer at Corvinus University of Budapest, in a recent interview with Telex, one of Hungary’s leading news outlets. Her assessment reflects a pattern visible across the Hungarian economy: women graduate from universities in large numbers, perform strongly in professional roles, and steadily climb into middle management. Then, at the threshold of executive leadership, their representation collapses.
This article looks closely at why that happens and what can realistically be done about it. It summarizes the structural barriers that hold women back from senior roles, presents the business case for balanced decision-making teams, and outlines concrete steps for both organizations and individual professionals. The goal is to give readers — managers, HR leaders, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals — information they can act on, not just statistics to lament.
Why Women Remain Underrepresented in Senior Leadership in Hungary
Hungary presents a paradox that surprises many outside observers. The country’s female employment rate has risen substantially over the past decade, women make up a majority of students in several higher education fields, and they are well represented in skilled professional occupations. Yet when you examine the boards and executive committees of Hungary’s largest companies, the picture changes sharply. The share of women in these decision-making bodies remains well below the European Union average, and female chief executives are rare in both listed companies and large private firms.
This is what researchers describe as a “leaky pipeline”: the problem is not entry into the workforce or even early advancement, but a steady loss of women at each successive management level. As the Telex interview with Csoma highlighted, the issue is not a shortage of capable candidates. It is a set of structural conditions that filter women out of contention precisely when they accumulate the experience senior roles require.
Structural Barriers That Keep Women Out of Executive Roles
Understanding the causes matters, because different causes demand different remedies. Four barriers come up repeatedly in research on women leadership, and each has a direct Hungarian equivalent.
The Broken Rung: The First Promotion Into Management
The single most consequential filter is the very first step up. Studies across multiple markets show that women are promoted to their first management position at lower rates than men, often because companies promote on perceived “readiness” rather than demonstrated results. If fewer women enter management at the start of their careers, no later-stage diversity initiative can fully repair the arithmetic. Every subsequent leadership level inherits a smaller female candidate pool than the one below it.
The Unequal Distribution of Care Work
Hungarian women still carry the majority of childcare and household responsibilities, and executive careers demand long, unpredictable hours. The collision is most acute in the thirties and early forties — exactly the decade when leadership trajectories are decided. Companies that treat visible, around-the-clock presence as a proxy for commitment systematically disadvantage employees with caregiving duties. The result is not only lost female talent but a leadership culture that mistakes exhaustion for dedication.
Networks, Sponsorship, and the Visibility Gap
Senior appointments are rarely the product of job postings alone. They emerge from informal networks, recommendations, and sponsorship from senior leaders who advocate for a candidate behind closed doors. Women are frequently over-mentored and under-sponsored: they receive plenty of advice, but fewer senior figures actively spend their political capital to position them for top roles. When the existing executive group is predominantly male, its spontaneous networks tend to reproduce themselves.
Narrow Definitions of What a Leader Looks Like
Assessment criteria quietly encode an image of leadership modelled on those already at the top. Decisiveness is read as confidence in one candidate and as abrasiveness in another; identical résumés are rated differently depending on the name and pronouns attached to them. These effects are rarely deliberate, which is exactly why they persist. Structured evaluation, standardized criteria, and diverse interview panels are the most reliable countermeasures available to employers.
Why Public Discussion Led by Educators Like Anita Csoma Matters
Anita Csoma teaches at Corvinus University of Budapest, an institution that has produced generations of Hungarian business leaders, economists, and policymakers. When a lecturer who works daily with the country’s future managers speaks publicly about the absence of women at the top of corporate Hungary, the statement carries weight in two directions at once. It presses employers to examine their own promotion patterns, and it signals to students that this is a live professional issue they will confront — and can influence — throughout their careers.
News coverage of this kind also performs a quieter function: it keeps the topic on the public agenda between legislative debates and quota campaigns. Hungary has so far resisted binding board quotas of the kind introduced in several EU member states, which makes cultural and professional pressure — transmitted through media interviews, corporate practice, and business schools themselves — one of the main engines of change.
The Business Case for Gender-Balanced Decision-Making
The argument for change is not only ethical — it is operational. Research on large samples of companies across Europe and North America has repeatedly associated gender-diverse management teams with stronger financial performance, better innovation output, and more disciplined risk assessment. The mechanism is intuitive: homogeneous groups converge on assumptions quickly and challenge each other less; mixed groups surface more alternatives and scrutinize them more thoroughly.
There is also a market logic. Women influence the majority of household purchasing decisions, form half of the talent pool companies recruit from, and increasingly factor a prospective employer’s diversity record into their own career choices. A leadership team that bears little resemblance to its customers and employees is, in practical terms, navigating with incomplete instruments. Companies that correct this tend to produce fewer strategic blind spots, not just better press releases.
What Hungarian Companies Can Do Differently
Employers are not powerless in the face of these patterns. Several interventions have a documented track record:
- Publish transparent promotion criteria. When the path to senior roles is explicit, discretionary filtering loses much of its force.
- Track the numbers at every level. You cannot manage a gap you only measure at the board. Report the gender composition of each management tier annually.
- Build sponsorship, not just mentoring. Pair high-potential women with senior leaders whose mandate includes active advocacy, not only advice.
- Make flexible working a management standard. Normalize outcomes-based evaluation so that presence at the desk stops functioning as a proxy for performance.
- Require diverse candidate slates and panels. Structured processes reduce the influence of unexamined assumptions in hiring and promotion decisions.
None of these measures requires a quota or a budget line comparable to a major IT investment. They require consistency, measurement, and leadership that treats the management pipeline as a strategic asset. Have questions about implementing these practices in your organization? Schedule a free consultation to learn more — the earlier the pipeline is examined, the cheaper the fixes become.
Practical Steps for Women Aiming at Senior Roles
Individual strategies matter too, and the evidence points to a handful of choices with outsized impact:
- Target line-management roles with real profit-and-loss exposure. These positions build the track record that executive selection committees look for.
- Ask directly for sponsorship. Naming the request — “I would like you to advocate for me for this role” — converts a vague mentoring relationship into an active one.
- Negotiate for scope, not only salary. Title and remuneration follow the size of the mandate; protect the mandate first.
- Build visibility outside your own reporting line. Cross-functional projects, industry events, and professional publications make your work legible to people who do not see it daily.
- Invest in structured leadership education. Formal programmes signal ambition, fill technical gaps, and expand professional networks in ways that self-directed learning rarely matches.
For professionals weighing that last point, explore the executive programmes at Corvinus University of Budapest to compare formats designed for people who intend to keep working while they study.
How Business Education Supports the Shift
Universities shape the leadership pipeline long before the corporate stage. Corvinus University of Budapest occupies a specific position in this system: as one of Hungary’s leading business schools, its classrooms, case discussions, and executive courses are where many of the country’s future decision-makers first encounter questions of organizational behaviour, inclusive management, and evidence-based leadership. Teaching that confronts the underrepresentation of women directly — rather than treating it as an external social issue — equips graduates to recognize these dynamics in their first management roles, years before they sit on the other side of the hiring table.
For readers considering a formal step in that direction, the university’s MBA programme and its portfolio of specialist postgraduate degrees combine academic research with practitioner experience, and its student and alumni community doubles as a professional network across Hungarian industry. Learn more about the curriculum and admissions requirements to judge whether the timing fits your career plans.
A Realistic Path Forward for Women Leadership in Hungary
The core message emerging from the Telex interview with Anita Csoma is refreshingly unsentimental: the low proportion of women at the highest levels of corporate decision-making is not a mystery, and it is not self-correcting. It is the accumulated result of identifiable mechanisms — the broken first promotion, the unequal weight of care work, opaque networks, and narrow images of what leadership looks like. Every one of those mechanisms can be changed, and companies that change them gain access to a talent pool their competitors are neglecting.
Progress will come from the combined effort of employers redesigning their promotion systems, educators preparing graduates for the realities they will face, and professionals making deliberate, strategic career decisions. If you found this analysis useful, share it with a colleague who shapes hiring or promotion decisions — and if you are ready to invest in your own leadership development, submit your application today. The composition of Hungary’s boardrooms a decade from now is being decided by choices made in the current one.
