Women and the labyrinth of leadership

From PLN

Women and the labyrinth of leadership

by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest September 2007

Why do so few women make it to the top in the corporate world? “It’s not the glass ceiling, but the sum of many obstacles along the way.”

The glass ceiling metaphor that has persisted for the last 20 years “implies that women and men have equal access to entry- and midlevel positions.” But they don’t. And the problem with believing this incorrect metaphor is that it leads people to propose incorrect solutions to the problem, which other kinds of interventions might attack “more potently.” So the authors propose a better metaphor: the labyrinth. “If we can understand the various barriers that make up this labyrinth, and how some women find their way around them, we can work more effectively to improve the situation.”

Obstructions include:

Vestiges of prejudice. In general women are paid less than men and promotions come more slowly.
Resistance to women’s leadership. Women and men are perceived to have different traits. Men are associated with more “leadership” traits; women are associated with more “compassionate” traits. Assertive behavior can actually reduce a woman’s chances of advancing in her career. One study showed that people suspect that highly successful female managers must not be very likable or nice.
Issues of leadership style. Women managers frequently struggle to develop an appropriate leadership style, trying to reconcile the communal qualities expected in women with the qualities expected in leaders. But research has shown that female managers are actually more transformational leaders than male managers, “especially when it came to giving support and encouragement to subordinates.”
Demands of family life. Women are the ones who interrupt their careers, take more days off and work part-time. Subsequently, they have less job experience, slower career progress and lower earnings.
Underinvestment in social capital. Social capital may be “even more necessary to managers’ advancement than skillful performance of traditional managerial tasks.”

Management interventions that work:

Increase people’s awareness of the causes of prejudice toward female managers, and work to dispel those perceptions.
Change the long-hours norm, if there is one in your organization.
Reduce the subjectivity of performance evaluations. Use open-recruitment tools (advertising, etc.) to fill positions, rather than informal social networks and referrals.
Ensure a critical mass of women in executive positions “to head off the problems that come with tokenism.”
Avoid having a sole female member of any team. In those situations, women tend to be ignored by the men.
Help shore up social capital. “When a well-placed individual...takes an interest in a woman’s career, her efforts to build social capital can proceed far more efficiently.”
Prepare women for line management with appropriately demanding assignments.
Establish family-friendly human resources practices. Family friendly HR practices have been shown to increase the proportion of women in senior management.
Give employees with significant parental responsibility more time to prove themselves.
Encourage male participation in family-friendly benefits.

“With a greater understanding of what stands in the way of gender-balanced leadership, we draw nearer to attaining it in our time.”

(Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership,” Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2007. Available on EBSCOhost Business Source Premier, or from Harvard Business Online for $6.50.)