The European Commission’s all-powerful Competition department admits it has a problem promoting women right to the top.
That may seem odd when, at the political level, women do hold the very top competition jobs in town. The EU’s superstar Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager is backed up by Ditte Juul-Jørgensen as her chief of staff and Linsey McCallum as deputy chief of staff.
It’s another story in the highest echelons of the civil service: the Directorate General for Competition. While the 800-person department — the ninth-biggest of the Commission’s 45 departments — is evenly split between men and women in its junior and mid-level policy adviser ranks, it’s a virtual single-sex environment at the top of the organization.
Of the department’s top policy positions — those of director level and above who handle individual cases against companies and governments — 12 of the top 13 posts are occupied by men.
The Competition department isn’t the most imbalanced in the Commission. In the Commission’s Informatics department, which supplies IT services and advice to EU institutions and national governments, men make up 82 percent of adviser-level staff (those who manage policy and strategy rather than administrative tasks), according to Commission statistics from April 2018. Gertrud Ingestad, who heads the department, is female.
The Competition department stands out among the big top-flight departments for its lack of women at director level and above.
The percentage of male advisers is similarly skewed at the Commission’s Joint Research Center (76 percent), Brexit task force (73 percent), and Energy department (72 percent), compared with the Competition department’s 55 percent male cohort.
But the Competition department stands out among the big top-flight departments for its lack of women at director level and above.
The Commission’s Economic and Financial Affairs department has fewer female advisers but a female deputy director general (Kerstin Jorna) and three female directors out of 10 (Elena Flores, Mary Veronica Tovšak Pleterski, and Michaela di Bucci). At the Commission’s Trade department, both deputy directors general are women (Helena König and Sandra Gallina).
The Commission says it has undertaken “sustained efforts” — with the full blessing of Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker — to develop and promote more women to senior roles, but admits it has fallen short in its highest profile department.
Vestager, left, with her deputy chief of staff Linsey McCallum | European Commission audiovisual
“We fully agree that we need more women in senior management in DG Competition and in the whole of the Commission,” a European Commission spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said that from July 2018 it expects that two in five “head of unit” posts — the department’s most important middle-management layer — will be held by women. “We are making progress but more needs to be done,” the spokesperson said.
German and male
While the post of European competition commissioner has been held by women for nine of the last 14 years — Vestager since November 2014, and Neelie Kroes from 2004-2009 — there’s never been a female civil service departmental chief.
Five German men ran the Competition department and its predecessor nonstop from 1968 to 2002. Since then, Philip Lowe (U.K.), Alexander Italianer (Netherlands) and the current chief, Johannes Laitenberger (Germany), have captained the ship.
The other members of the civil service holy trinity that governs EU competition policy, the department’s chief economist (Tommaso Valletti) and the head of the Commission legal service competition team (Theofanis Christoforou), are men.
The lone female policy director at DG COMP is Maria Velentza, a Greek working on financial sector cases.
McCallum, a Scot who holds only British nationality, is the figure in Vestager’s team often touted as the woman most likely to scale the summit of the Competition department hierarchy.
Isabelle Benoliel, also a director, has led the department’s human resources team for a decade, and is considered by some who work in and with the department as its “unsung hero,” stepping in for other directors as needed, and undertaking essential but unglamorous work, like a current overhaul of the department’s system for document discovery.
Fabienne Ilzkovitz works as a “principal adviser” to Director General Johannes Laitenberger.
There is one category of staff where women dominate: assistants. Three-quarters secretarial and other administrative staff are women.
A burst of senior female appointments at the department occurred under Neelie Kroes.
Nadia Calviño was a deputy director general in DG Comp, then director general at the Budget department, before returning to Spanish politics | javier Soriano/AFP via Getty Images
She lured Nadia Calviño from the Spanish competition authority at the age of 37, to be a deputy director general. The appointment ruffled many Brussels veterans at the time, because of Calviño’s relative youth and the fact she was imported from a national civil service.
Calviño shared the rank of deputy director general with Lowri Evans, also promoted under Kroes.
Just below them in the department’s organizational chart sat Irmfried Schwimann, who occupied an outsized role because of her responsibilities for bank rescues during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Limited mobility
All three women left the department in order to rise.
Evans and Calviño were replaced by two Spanish men — Cecilio Madero and Carles Esteva Mosso — during the term of Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, also of Spain.
Evans and Schwimann left for the Commission’s internal market department, while Calviño rose to director general at the Budget department before becoming Spain’s economy minister earlier this month.
Another rising star, Céline Gauer, also found herself with limited options for promotion within DG COMP and moved to the Commission’s much less powerful health department in March 2018, to take up a promotion to deputy director general.
While the Commission has a policy of actively encouraging its senior staff to move between departments, and senior women at DG Comp follow that policy, the senior men tend not to.
Gert-Jan Koopman is another male member of the senior hierarchy in the Commission’s Competition department | European Commission audiovisual
Stalwarts like Madero and Esteva Mosso (the current deputy directors general), Paul Csiszár, Kris Dekeyser, Karl Soukup, Guillaume Loriot, and Eric Van Ginderachter (all director level) have been on the department’s books for up to 31 years.
The department’s other deputy director general, Gert-Jan Koopman, is also male.
In their defense, Commission officials argue that competition specialists find it harder than other officials to move around the Commission’s many policy departments. That does not, however, explain why senior female competition officials move more often than the men.
McCallum, a Scot who holds only British nationality, is the figure in Vestager’s team often touted as the woman most likely to scale the summit of the Competition department hierarchy.
Unlike Juul-Jørgensen — her boss in Vestager’s office — McCallum is a permanent official of the competition department and will automatically return to a senior role there once Vestager’s term ends in 2019. Yet in her case, the politics of Brexit and the uncertain fate of senior British officials may complicate her rise up the EU’s highest civil service ranks.