The Battle for Female Talent in Brazil - Center for Work-Life Policy

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manager in 2007, is the first female executive to lead the company’s operations
in the region; Regina Nuñes heads up Standard & Poor’s in Brazil. Others have
succeeded in building and growing their own businesses. After a successful career
in hotel management, Chieko Aoki founded Blue Tree Hotels, one of the largest
hotel chains in Brazil. Ana Lucia Sierra launched Age with two (male) partners
in 2000. Today, it’s one of Brazil’s leading advertising agencies, twice winning
Brazilian advertising’s top industry award.
These women represent the vanguard of a host of ambitious and qualified
women pouring into the Brazilian workforce. Between 1980 and 2008, Brazil had
one of the highest increases in women’s labor force participation rate in the world,
from 38 percent to 60 percent of women age 15 and up, a figure close to that in
the United States and Western Europe. 13 Access to education has played a big
part. Today, one in three college-age women are enrolled in tertiary education
and women represent an extraordinary 60 percent of the nation’s annual class of
university graduates. 14
This influx of talent into Brazil’s educated workforce can’t happen a moment
too soon, as a growing number of global companies pin their hopes for growth on
Brazil’s burgeoning economy. “Brazil is becoming as relevant as the U.S. and some
European markets for global companies in certain industries,” observes Ariel
Fleichman, a principal with Booz & Company. As the economy shifts from low-cost
manufacturing and commodity-based industries, Fleichman notes, “It is becoming
a center of excellence and, of course, that increases the demand for
talent.”
In fact, Brazil is already embroiled in a war for top talent that
is as heated as in any of the emerging markets. As the economy
expands, the hunt for talent “has accelerated a lot,” says Satya
Menard, executive president for Sodexo Central and South
America. “A week doesn’t pass without me personally having to
intervene with an employee who is lured by another [company’s]
offer.” With the company’s Brazilian operations growing at 20
percent a year, Menard says, “this is a real challenge—not only for
us but for our clients.”
A 2010 Towers Watson study found that 81 percent of
businesses in Brazil reported difficulties identifying talent with
critical skills, a situation described in another analysis as a “brain
strain.” 15 In certain specialized and highly technical disciplines,
such as engineering, the shortage is especially acute: in 2009,
for instance, Brazil generated 38,000 engineering graduates for a
market that has an estimated demand for 60,000 engineers. 16 With the demand for
skilled, highly qualified workers continuing to outpace supply, competition for the
best and the brightest is sure to remain intense.
The solution to the talent crunch has been hiding in plain sight: educated
Brazilian women—who remain relatively under-utilized and under-leveraged. But to
effectively recruit, develop and advance this valuable talent pool, employers need
a clearer understanding of the unique needs and aspirations of qualified female
talent in Brazil.
Our research rests upon two fundamental premises: first, that educated women
in Brazil in no way lag behind their counterparts in developed markets; and
second, that they are not Latin American clones of Western women professionals.
It is only through a nuanced understanding of the complex realities of this
valuable talent pool that employers can begin to “get it right,” that is, to establish
the processes and systems for managing talent which allow qualified women to
flourish and contribute as fully as their male peers.
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Figure 3:
Female participation in the labor force
Percent of female population ages 15-64
64% 69%
36%
75%
Brazil Russia India China
u.S. uk
7
69% 69%
Source: World Bank database, 2008 data, most recent
available.