Women make up 71.4% of the workforce at Spain’s accredited non-profit organisations, yet only 46.7% of those organisations are chaired by a woman, according to Fundación Lealtad’s 2026 study on female presence in the Third Sector.
The gap widens further in resources: NGOs led by women manage an average budget of €5.7 million, against €8.9 million for those led by men, a 36% difference.
At the same time, Spain’s schools are entering a period of sustained contraction, with primary and secondary enrolment projected to fall
by more than 600,000 students between 2025 and 2035, according to a joint study by the Fundación Ramón Areces and Fundación Sociedad y Educación. A sector with a well-documented leadership pipeline problem is about to be asked to manage consolidation at
scale.
A pipeline that works at entry level and narrows at the top
The pattern in Spain’s non-profit sector is specific enough to be worth naming precisely. Fundación Lealtad’s research found that 61.2% of accredited organisations now have a woman in the General Director role, up 12 percentage points over five years. That role is usually reached through internal promotion, which is why the figure broadly tracks
the workforce’s gender composition.
The Board Presidency is a different story: only 46.7% are chaired by a woman, and that role is typically filled
through external appointment, a process where, according to Fundación Lealtad’s own analysis, structural bias
has more room to operate. The larger the organisation, the less likely it is to be led by a woman at either level.
This has produced a role that most boards have not formally named yet: a General Director increasingly expected to carry board-level governance responsibilities that, until recently, sat exclusively with the Presidency. Compensation structures and job
descriptions have not caught up with what the role now actually requires.
A new role born from the enrolment decline
Spain’s primary education stage is projected to lose close to 400,000 students between 2025 and 2035, with secondary education (ESO) losing a cumulative 376,000 over the same period, an effect that will intensify after 2030, according to the Ramón Areces and Sociedad y Educación study. This has created demand for a role that barely existed five years ago in the Spanish education sector:
a Head of Network Consolidation, responsible for deciding which schools merge, downsize, or close as enrolment contracts. It is not a role with an obvious internal candidate pool.
Boards are increasingly looking outside education entirely, toward executives with restructuring experience in retail or healthcare, because the skill being hired for is managing decline in an orderly way, not running a school.
Roles and how they’re changing
| Role | What it used to require | What it requires now |
|---|---|---|
| General Director (non-profit) | Programme delivery and internal operations | Board-level governance fluency, previously reserved for the Presidency |
| Board President (non-profit) | Reputational figurehead, external representation | Active fundraising and strategic accountability, especially at larger organisations |
| Head of Network Consolidation (education) | Did not exist as a defined role | Enrolment forecasting, asset rationalisation, closure and merger planning |
| Rural Education Strategist | Not a distinct function | Dedicated focus on the earliest and sharpest enrolment declines, concentrated in rural municipalities |
Why the budget gap is a sourcing signal, not just an equity statistic
Most search processes treat the gender budget disparity as background context for a diversity conversation, separate from the
technical brief of the search itself. In Zavala Civitas’s experience, this data point is directly useful for sourcing: a meaningful number of highly capable women currently run smaller non-profit organisations at a scale below what their capability would justify, largely because larger board presidencies have not yet been offered to them. For a client seeking a General Director or President for a larger organisation, this is an underused candidate pool, not a side issue.
If you want to know more about our executive search services in this sector click here.
Methodology & Citations
Zavala Civitas combines leadership-market mapping with assessment of governance readiness, succession pathways and consolidation experience across education and non-profit organisations. The analysis is supported by research from Fundación Lealtad and demographic projections from Fundación Ramón Areces and Fundación Sociedad y Educación.
Frequently Asked Questions: Executive Search in Spain for Education and Non-Profit
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