Gender differences in the Hungarian workplace - some observations

Whew...it's been a busy day for me! So busy that I am first getting in this entry at 15.11 in the afternoon (that's 3:11pm for those of you stateside). I had a meeting at 7.30 this morning. Doesn't that make me sound important? In any case, I had two meetings back to back this morning, both rather interesting.

The first meeting was at the American Chamber of Commerce offices (at 7.30am!). It was a meeting of AmCham's Corporate Governance Committee. The main activity was to talk a little about the corporate governance project I am working on (trying to get a Directors' Training Institute off the ground so that Hungarian business people are at least marginally schooled in proper board service) and then have a very deep discussion of the new Hungarian Companies Act, which is currently being written by the legislature (and some other folks who are helping out). It was pretty cool, actually, to sit in a room with all sorts of people - American, Canadian, Hungarian, even a Brit - and talk about how we would make the law better. Also interesting was that one of the guys on our committee is also on the committee that is actually writing the law (huh? how does that work!?) and I got a good inside look at how things really get done around here.

Meeting attendance: 8 men, 2 women (including me)

The next meeting was here in our building and was a meeting of the Global Compact in Hungary's steering committee. This was a diverse group of people from various organizations - the UN, of course, as the Global Compact is a UN project, the ILO, the Hungarian Business Leaders Forum, the Global Business Council on Sustainable Development-Hungary, OTP Bank, Mol (the leading petrol company here) and Holcim, a Swedish cement company with a large Hungarian subsidiary. They were from all different countries, too - Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Britain, the US (of course).

It was a strange sensation to sit in this meeting where everyone in the room - literally everyone - had a different accent! Even the two Americans (me and Heather) don't have the same accent. Truth be told, it got old after a while, straining to understand what everyone was both actually saying and also trying to say, since they didn't usually get it quite right (except for Natasha, who is British and speaks beautifully). The meeting itself was a bit of an exercise in navel-gazing (after many years of hearing this phrase, it now makes PERFECT sense to me!).

Meeting attendance: 8 women, 2 men

The meeting wasn't exactly well-led by the UN people (I think one of them was kind of junior and, presumably as a professional development measure, was given responsibility for the meeting but she didn't do such a great job). And in addition, there were several side conversations going on. Most notably, the two men at the meeting sat at the far end of the table away from most of the rest of the group and whispered to each other a lot. Cracking jokes and making asides, these two were, I thought, pretty rude. My earlier meeting had no such side conversations, snickering or whispers. And I wondered if it was because the meeting was poorly run or because the meeting had so many women or because the meeting was poorly run by so many women. I suspect it was the latter. I mean, the whole meeting felt more like a kaffeeklatsch than a business meeting. Was that because that's what meetings with women always feel like? Or was it because these particular people, women or otherwise, were not especially adept at running meetings? And did it just seem so much worse because my earlier meeting, deftly led by a man who was managing many personalities and dueling egos, was so well-executed?

I don't know. But it made for an interesting day for sure.