If there is one sector where women should probably be calling the shots, it’s retail. After all, they are its biggest customers and they account for the bulk of its workforce. Yet women are mostly absent from corporate suites at European retailers, and Melanie Smith fears the coronavirus pandemic may have made matters worse. “A lot of things I have seen make me worry that women have gone back 20 years during the pandemic,” says the chief executive officer of online British grocer Ocado Retail and one of the sector’s few female leaders in Europe. She noted that women carried much of the burden of home chores and childcare during the lockdown , leaving them with less time for their careers. Even before the virus struck, a decade of gender equality efforts have put only a handful of women in key executive positions in the European retail sector. In Britain, not a single retailer in the FTSE 350 is run by a woman. In the rest of Europe, only three per cent of the 87 main consumption and retail goods companies are female-run, according to a report in January by the European Union-backed European Women on Boards. That’s even though studies over the years have shown that globally, women drive between 70 per cent and 80 per cent of all consumer purchasing. They also make up most of the retail industry’s workforce. A Bloomberg survey of the top two dozen listed retail, fashion and luxury firms in Europe found female employees accounted for 63 per cent of the workforce on average. Yet less than a quarter of these companies had women in top leadership roles. While many companies have set lofty gender targets and have added women to their supervisory boards, they have few female executives making high-level decisions. Germany’s Adidas , which counts Beyoncé among its brand ambassadors, Zalando, which sells women’s clothes and accessories, and eyewear retailer Fielmann, whose workforce is about 72 per cent female, have no women on their management boards. In the United States, women are gaining ground, with female executives at the helm of several retailers, including The TJX Companies and Williams-Sonoma and two grocery chains, Giant Eagle and Wegmans Food Markets. Judith McKenna, the CEO of Walmart’s international division, is arguably the most powerful woman in retail globally. In contrast, Europe has been slow to promote women to top jobs. As the region slowly emerges from the grip of the pandemic, some like Angela Cretu, the CEO of Avon , the direct seller of beauty products, say the crisis will boost opportunities for women. “The era of spending eight hours a day in a certain location and commuting back and forth has gone and will never come back in the same way,” she said. Like her, Fran Minogue, the founder of executive search firm Clarity, is hoping the new-found flexibility of working from home will open more doors to women. It will not only unlock “huge opportunities” but will allow “male chief executives to see there can be different ways of doing things”, she said. Perhaps. But the sector’s history is replete with unmet good intentions. Take Richemont chairman Johann Rupert, for instance. In 2016, he said he wanted fewer grey-haired Frenchmen running the Swiss luxury goods company. It didn’t make sense for the owner of brands such as Cartier and Chloé to have decision makers who didn’t mirror its customer base, he said. Four years on, two-thirds of the company’s senior executive committee, led by CEO Jerome Lambert , is still French. All six executives on the committee are men and five are 50 or older. On the group’s governance board, only four of the 20 members are women. “Companies that predominantly have a majority of women in the ranks often have men in the top jobs; it is not about a shortage of talent or ambition,” said Denise Wilson White, who heads the British-government-backed Hampton-Alexander Review. “Women aren’t getting picked because there is bias in the selection process and male leaders are often choosing successors in their own image.” Women at the lower end of the work spectrum have also been hit harder during the pandemic, bearing the brunt of the retail sector’s pain as jobs were axed. “Women tend to be over-represented in precarious forms of employment such as part-time, short-term or even undocumented work,” said Oliver Roethig, regional secretary of the labour union UNI Europe. “Most lay-offs we have seen so far have been in fast fashion , an area within retail in which women make up an even higher proportion of workers.” There are good business reasons for promoting women. Large firms in Britain whose executive boards are one-third female are 10 times more profitable on average than all-male boards, according to gender-diversity consultancy The Pipeline. Companies like Richemont, Zalando, Adidas, Fielmann and GrandVision say they are working towards achieving greater gender equality. Richemont last year appointed Marina Corti as its director of diversity. The latest report for the company, where women make up 58 per cent of the workforce, shows some progress. Women now represent 34 per cent of the group’s 440 top management positions and 17 per cent of the group’s CEO roles. Gucci owner Kering fares better. Women account for 63 per cent of its headcount , 55 per cent of group leadership roles, 33 per cent of the executive committee and 60 per cent of the board of directors. Similarly at LVMH , women now occupy 44 per cent of senior leadership positions compared to only 23 per cent in 2007, according to its last annual report. I think it will not be too long before we see the rise of a female-led luxury conglomerate. Change is happening Natalie Massenet, creator of Net-a-Porter Natalie Massenet, who created the fashion portal Net-a-Porter and co-founded Imaginary, a venture fund that focuses on consumer brands, says many luxury brands were established and “built by men and they are not going to replace themselves”. That said, she believes the retail sector is becoming more inclusive and that the pandemic will fuel this positive momentum. “They are hiring a lot of women at Kering and LVMH and I think it will not be too long before we see the rise of a female-led luxury conglomerate,” she said. “Change is happening.” In January, Sweden’s Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) named Helena Helmersson as the first female CEO of the fast fashion pioneer. Other prominent women in the sector include Anne Pitcher, managing director of the Selfridges group in Britain, and Sharon White, the chairman of department store company John Lewis. Then there is make-up artist Charlotte Tilbury, who recently sold her eponymous beauty products business to Puig, the Spanish fragrance and fashion group, for £1 billion (US$1.3 billion), seven years after founding it. Still, that’s a woefully small group of women in a sea of men. Obstacles remain, says Ocado’s Smith, and greater flexibility is needed in everything from shared parental leave to working from home. “My fundamental belief is that if we can support parents, not just women, to raise families and care for parents, then we will balance out the playing field over time,” she said.