Malta has one of the lowest rates in the EU of women on company boards, according to a new report released ahead of International Women’s Day.

The country scored in the bottom three – tied with Greece – with only 10 per cent of females sitting on boards of publicly listed companies.

Estonia and Cyprus were the only two countries to rank worse. Top of the list was France (45 percent), followed by Sweden (38 percent), Belgium, Germany and Italy (36 percent) and the Netherlands and Finland (34 percent).

The Eurostat report also found that of the 6.7 million managers across the EU only 2.7 million are female. Just over a quarter (28 percent) of board members of publicly listed companies are women and less than one fifth of senior executives are female. 

“In other words, although representing approximately half of all employed persons in the EU, women continue to be under-represented amongst managers” notes the report, which was carried out in 2019.

When it comes to female managers, Malta scored better at 32 per cent, matching Greece, Croatia and Austria. The country with the largest share of female managers was Latvia, which also is the only country where women outnumber men as managers at 53 percent. 

It was followed by Bulgaria (49 per cent), Poland (48 per cent), Estonia (46 per cent), Slovenia (44 per cent), Lithuania, Hungary and Sweden (42 per cent), Ireland (41 per cent) and Portugal (40 per cent). 

At the opposite end of the scale, women account for less than a third of all managers in Cyprus (19 per cent), followed by Luxembourg (23 per cent), Denmark (27 per cent), Italy (28 per cent), the Netherlands (29 per cent), Czechia and Germany (31 per cent).

At EU level, just over a third of managers are women. This share increased slightly compared to 2012 when 36 percent of managers were female.