I think it has to do with culture, but not in the way you suggest. Up until the mid seventies, Spain suffered a dictatorship that followed a bloody civil war. T

I think it has to do with culture, but not in the way you suggest. Up until the mid seventies, Spain suffered a dictatorship that followed a bloody civil war. That means that for decades society had very little social mobility and a lot of cronyism. Scientists, artists and intellectuals in general were purged during the war, looked down upon later, and the inherent censorship and closeness of authoritarian governments made the country culturally barren. Many decades have passed since then, and nowadays Spain is of course a fully developed democracy, but the remains of that society still exist. It is present for example in the value given to stable jobs by the low-middle class, where people basically assume a glass ceiling - "why take risks changing jobs or try to start a business? You don't have the contacts nor the money anyway". The lack of people with technical backgrounds in the upper class is also very evident: In the US you'll find many engineers that later went for an MBA and moved into leadership positions, and many companies have engineers as founders. Here, business administration is a career, not a masters degree, and for people who graduate in such programs, it is assumed that they already have the money or the connections to start their careers already in a leadership position - they practically choose "boss" as their job description, so to speak.