Located in São José dos Campos (SP), it has 20 employees and offers services in the areas of Industrial Automation, Projects and Electrical Infrastructure, Projects and Assembly of Electrical Panels, Adequacy of Safety at Work (NR 10 and NR 12), Qualification of Industrial Equipment and Processes, Machine Design, Equipment, Assembly and Mechanical Maintenance, Projects and Consulting in HVAC-R. Recently, PHS Automação e Instalações Industrias was nominated for The Rise to The Challenge Awards – 2021, Brazil/Latin America stage. Company managed by a woman, with international certification from WEConnect, for over 10 years in the service market.
Maria Ilisi Monteiro, Operations and EHS Manager at PHS Automação e Equipamentos Industriais clarifies some questions about the importance of diversity:
Until 2011 she worked in the vicinity of her region, São José dos Campos and São Paulo, and, in November 2013, with the departure of her brother from the company, together with her husband Paulo Henrique, they signed the partnership, however, she defined that he would continue in his job, as his salary was important to continue the enterprise. “I was very divided, as I had moments when I was in the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco, and the company’s tasks, the girls’ activities, and my house continued. In 2018, due to family problems, I committed to taking over the company, and new ideas and new commitments came.” In 2020 the PHS company was certified as a “Women’s Company” through WEConnect International, and that same year the pandemic came. Everything stopped, contracts that were in progress were postponed, there was a drop in the offer of new services and there was still the issue of keeping employees with a healthy job.
Thanks to her entrepreneurial vision, she revised costs, negotiated salaries, and remodeled the management, so in June 2020 things gradually returned, expenses and income were organized and, principally, no employee was fired. Among the difficulties she faced, the ones that consumed her the most were always related to distance from the family, the volume of responsibilities, and the biggest of the biggest were always having to impose herself as an entrepreneurial woman, as she chose activities closely related to male activities. And according to Maria Ilisi, firmly believes that women entrepreneurs do have different obstacles, because she is living proof of them, in her career, there was a lot of discussions, a lot of prejudice, the need to prove that you do know what you say, many meetings where men wouldn’t let her even finish a sentence, there were successive times when she had to raise her voice, unfortunately.
The overload related to daily activities is present in all hierarchical levels of women’s lives, I am not the only one and I have never been.
We are in the 21st century, and surveys indicate that this year of 2021 there will be more women in leadership positions, the finding is that there is a strong intention on the part of executives to increase the number of women in the composition of the boards of these companies. However, there is a concern, as it is evident that this increase is directly linked to increasing other diversity indices such as race, color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education, age, religion, among others. This movement can be considered as a response to the manifestations of diversity that have been so evident in recent years. Although she considers this process important and necessary, as it is a way to guarantee better working conditions and, above all, to focus on a more diverse and inclusive management model. In Brazil, 34% of leadership positions are held by women, this number is even higher than the world average which is 29%, but assuming the position and not being paid the same as men is another struggle.
In her understanding, even if gender inequality still persists, male dominance is conjectured that intuition, communication, organization, systemic vision, among other attributes, make a difference in people’s leadership, and these, in general, are highly valued qualities in a moment in which it is characterized by female leadership. Thus, even if they do not consider these characteristics as innate, but rather socially constructed, these attributes can be seen positively by companies. According to Silva, 2000, “contemporary good practices in organizational management recommend trust, openness, dialogue, tolerance for errors and encouragement of an entrepreneurial spirit”.
The managerial model of the new era demands that the old, already outdated and typically masculine concepts of competition and aggression be changed to those of cooperation and relationships of affections, essential to the humanization process”.
