... but Peter and Thomas are Running the Show

Marion Heil
vor 10 Stunden
6 Min. Lesezeit

Women at the Top of Austrian Business - for International Women's Day 2026

International Women’s Day again. What has changed since last year?

A week ago, the MERIT report asked a question that shouldn't need asking anymore:

How is it possible that not a single ATX company is led by a woman?

The answer arrived with the quiet thud of a fact no one can argue with: it's 2026, and across all 55 companies listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange – not only in the ATX, but also in the WBI -, there is not one female CEO. Not one.

And the most common first name among Austrian board members is Peter. (The most common first name among Austrian supervisory board members is Thomas).

That's not a punchline. That's a data point.

The numbers, straight up

As of January 1st, 2026, women hold 26 of the 188 board seats at Austria's listed companies - 13.8 percent. That figure hasn't moved since August 2025. The EU average sits at 24.7 percent. Only Luxembourg scores lower in Europe.

The supervisory board picture is more encouraging. Women now hold 166 of the 523 supervisory board seats at Austria’s listed companies – 31,7%. Better, but not yet enough. Since the mandatory 30 percent gender quota for supervisory boards came into force in 2018, female representation in affected listed companies has climbed from 22.4 percent to 38 percent. That's 15 percentage points in seven years. Not fast enough - but proof that structure works.

This is the split that defines Austria's gender leadership story right now: supervisory boards have genuinely become more diverse - but the operational level, the people who actually run things day to day, remains firmly a male domain.

Supervisory boards have genuinely become more diverse - but the operational level remains firmly a male domain.

And it tells us something else: where legal quotas apply, progress happens.

Which is why Austria's new corporate governance law (GesLeiPoG), passed in Decrember 2026, feels like a half-step: a binding 40% quota for supervisory boards, but nothing mandatory for executive boards. An earlier draft had included one – but it was quietly dropped. As Martha Schultz, chair of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, put it with refreshing directness already a few years back: "There's no other way. Voluntarily, almost nothing happens."

She's right. The data proves it every year.

A word on the quota debate. Arguing for structure is not arguing against excellence. The women who make it to the top of Austrian business do so on merit - full stop.

Arguing for structure is not arguing against excellence. The women who make it to the top of Austrian business do so on merit - full stop.

What quotas do, when they work, is make sure that merit is actually what gets evaluated, rather than familiarity, habit, or an unconscious preference for the profile that has always been there.

Mindset matters enormously. But mindset alone, as thirty years of largely flat numbers show, is not enough. Structure gives the right mindset the conditions it needs to actually produce results. And there is one more thing quotas do: they put more women in visible leadership positions. That matters not just for today, but for the generation of young women watching who is allowed to sit at the table - and drawing their own conclusions about whether that could ever be them.

The women who are there, and deserve to be seen

Yes, they exist. They lead complex organizations, manage billions in assets, and make decisions that shape whole industries. There is a whole host of female board members and executives. They just tend to get less airtime than their male counterparts.

Sabine Herlitschka, Edith Hlawati, Gerda Holzinger-Burgstaller, Barbara Potisk-Eibensteiner, Herta Stockbauer, Andrea Fuhrmann, Eva Maria Holzleitner, Patricia Neumann, Elisabeth Stadler, and many more figure prominently in every ranking of Austria’s most influential business women – for good reason. They hold some of the most influential key seats where economic power sits in Austria.

That those women lead should be celebrated. That it’s still the exception rather than the rule should not be.

That those women lead should be celebrated. That it’s still the exception rather than the rule should not be.

The networks and the media that hold it together

Behind many of these women, and behind countless others building their careers toward the top, are Austria's women's networks, doing important, but frequently underappreciated work in the entire ecosystem.

Some examples:

IWF Austria, the Austrian chapter of the International Women's Forum, connects senior women leaders across 34 countries and over 8,000 members globally - a powerful peer community at the highest levels.
Zukunft.Frauen and its Alumnae Club brings together around 400 top female executives and entrepreneurs in a platform backed by the WKÖ and the Industriellenvereinigung, creating structured access across industries and hierarchies.
Club Alpha offers a space for women who are already at or near the top, where frank conversation replaces the usual professional performance.
And a noteworthy recent addition to this landscape is the Women Leadership Alliance (WLA), launched in September 2025 as the official women's initiative of the Wirtschaftsforum der Führungskräfte (WdF), Austria's largest independent executive network. The WLA is deliberately built as an open, mixed-gender platform, with the explicit view being that real change only happens when men are involved as partners, not bystanders. That's a mature and strategically smart framing.
Add long-established international networks like Business & Professional Women (BPW), active since 1930, and the European-rooted EWMD Austria, and you begin to see an ecosystem that is actively working to compensate for what formal corporate structures often fail to provide.

None of this happens without visibility, which is where media outlets play a quiet but crucial role. Many media, amongst others, Trend and Industriemagazin, showcase female leaders regularly, as does Sheconomy, a dedicated business magazine for women.

These networks and publications rarely make headlines themselves, but they create the relationships that lead to board nominations, the mentoring conversations that help women navigate critical career crossroads, and the shared intelligence to move through institutions that were not originally designed with them in mind.

Their contribution to the slow, steady progress we are seeing in Austrian is necessary and admirable.

What I see from the search side

After many years in executive search and board advisory, I can say this with some confidence: the pipeline of highly qualified women is rarely the problem.

The problem often is the search pattern.

The pipeline of highly qualified women is rarely the problem. The problem often is the search pattern.

When companies brief for "proven board experience in a listed industrial company, ideally with international P&L responsibility," they are, often without realizing it, describing a career path that was structurally unavailable to most women for most of their careers.

This means we’re not searching for the best candidate. We're searching for a profile that was shaped by exclusion.

Change the brief, and the candidate landscape changes. Structured, genuinely open search processes surface different names. Better names, often. Because the women who have built careers in the face of resistance tend to be exceptionally capable, and exceptionally motivated.

The business case has also never been clearer: a new OeNB study published in 2025 found that every ten percentage point increase in female supervisory board representation correlates with roughly one percentage point higher return on equity.

That's not a feel-good argument. That's a number that belongs in a board meeting.

What the next twelve months will decide

With the June 2026 deadline approaching, listed companies across Austria will need to appoint new supervisory board members to close the gap between their current 31.7 percent average and the required 40 percent. That means a significant number of mandates are about to open up.

This International Women's Day, we shouldn’t be interested in pledges. We should be interested in appointments – hard, clear and tangible. More women at the table where the actual decisions get made.

And maybe - just maybe - by Women's Day 2027, an Austrian ATX company will have a female CEO.

That would be something.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marion Heil is the founder and managing director of Board+CEO Advisors, a Vienna-based boutique specializing in executive search and board advisory for C-Suite and supervisory board mandates. She is based in Vienna - and has a particular soft spot for mandates that end with an exceptional woman at the table.

Illustration: “It was never a dress” by Tania Katan / Axosoft (2015). I borrow this image every year for International Women’s Day – because I love it and the message still hasn’t lost any of its relevance.