'A man in China takes a bat soup and at the other end of the world you got fired.' (@laJuani_Crazy).
Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a work session to involve new analysts in the Intelligence Function digitized with mussol by Antara. It was a pharmaceutical company, with a team distributed between Madrid and Barcelona.
A dozen people participated, including the leaders of the Intelligence Function, all women. I know that in the biopharmaceutical sector there is a high proportion of women in relative terms. But even so, the fact that 12 in 12 were women brought back to my mind an investigation that had been pending for months: Is the Competitive Intelligence Function becoming a women's led activity?
As a computer engineer, I experienced the decline of women's interest in the 1980s in my first area of knowledge. After some years at the university, we experienced a decreasing number of women entering the career of Computer Engineer. Partly joking, we have blamed Hollywood: Only with a few exceptions, all the characters with a computer expert role in the movies and TV series of that time were men with problems of human relationship and -who knows why- a lack of personal appeal (and even hygiene). A mysterious and abrupt change of tendency that occurred in the whole world, about which little has been investigated, and that both male and female university mates lamented. As you can see in this chart, my university has not been an isolated case.
Of course, the Intelligence Function is NOT a task for which IT knowledge is required -not even for its leadership-. But influenced by the experience of my student days, I have been especially attentive to female participation in various areas of technical knowledge. And why not, also in the Intelligence Function.
This is not meant to be an in-depth study, because I rely just on mussol users and I am also very busy, so I have limited myself to analyzing the last 20 Antara clients. mussol offers up to 6 levels of user with different responsibilities, but I have focused on the Administrators, in order to concentrate solely on the people who actually lead the Intelligence Function. Keep in mind also that each mussol account can include several Administrators users. Then I have been reading the first name of each user, to manually assign the appropriate sex in the statistics.
The result has been that almost three-quarters of the leaders of the Intelligence Function are women, as can be seen in the attached graph.
Among the clients analyzed (chosen by date as I said above) there are only 4 research organizations, due to the main focus of our company. Therefore there is a majority of the industry. And since it is assumed that among manufacturers there is a minority of leadership positions held by women, the bias should go against the obtained result.
Therefore, I can conclude that -at least from the perspective of Antara- the Intelligence Function is led by women.
Why? I don't know. Do you have any clue?
(Orlando is a fantastic movie from 1992, based on Virginia Woolf's novel of the same name, and starring Tilda Swinton. In it the protagonist becomes a woman throughout the life of several centuries).
Antara is committed to the fact that the published contents are created by its own team, clients or collaborators. Antara never subcontracts content generation. The opinions of the authors reflect their own points of view and not those of the company.
