The challenge of getting more women into leadership roles

Today despite all the hype, at the top, only 24 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women, which is less than 5 percent. In Sri Lanka, going by the Business Today Top Twenty Five Rankings for 12/13, it is less than 1 percent, which is clearly not a productive economic outcome.

Socially, most business leaders want to treat gender equally and be gender-neutral when picking people for key jobs.  It is the right thing to do. But, women are often and have historically been disadvantaged in those choices and not given an equal chance for those jobs. This situation could be due to the following;
 

•    Women may choose to participate in a mothering role, which takes her out of the opportunity space for a time
•     Woman may not have had the experiences, training, or skills because they were not in the workforce for a long period when compared to their male counterparts.
•    Leaders often select successors who look and feel similar to their preferences, and some men have not had women peers or bosses.

Globally, in the last two years women have made great strides in closing the gap for C- suite jobs, in fact women now are better educated than ever, stepping into high profile roles and are also outnumbering men as the primary bread winners in their households.



 

Occupational segregation

In most US companies, the percentage of women at or near the top has flattened. However, despite this shift most professional women continue to suffer from occupational segregation in the workplace and find it hard to break through the so-called “glass ceiling” or the “glass cliff” created by their male colleagues separating them from top-level jobs and the middle level professional positions. While South Asia has made substantial progress mainly due to the efforts of the state to close the gender gap in top managerial and professional jobs, for most women in top management it is still very lonely at the top, and the glass ceiling which has now become a glass cliff still remains relatively intact.

According to non-profit research group Catalyst’s, despite a few headline-grabbing gains in 2012, women still hold a very low percentage of the top jobs in the private and public sectors, although globally women represent more than 50 percent of the world’s labour force. Yet their share of management positions still remain unacceptably low with just a tiny proportion succeeding in breaking through the glass ceiling to get the top jobs. One explanation for this small number of female executives is the persistence of negative stereotypes about women as top managers. So, what do we need to do to help women “catch up” and be noticed?



 

Changing the culture

Attitudes about the role of women in society may have changed dramatically, but women are still perceived as being less suited than men to manage the top stressful, demanding and male dominated managerial positions.

Such perceptions about female managers may cause firms to underutilize a significant part of the work force. Because women now represent nearly half of the total labor force, yet several research studies proves that discrimination based on gender continues to occur in such areas such as oversees training, foreign postings, performance appraisal, mentoring opportunities, pay and available career paths. Therefore, shifting the culture to improve the day-to-day experience of women to ensure that they can build great careers will encourage greater gender diversity and inclusiveness.
 

Talent pool

We often hear the argument that even though more and more women are getting professionally qualified there are still an insufficient number of professionally trained women to fill the top jobs.

This argument is rapidly becoming outdated. For example, the numbers of women qualifying as Technology Professionals, Accountants and Lawyers have increased drastically over the last few years and many of them make that extra effort to invest time and money in CPD. While gender differences still exist in professional study choices, women worldwide are demonstrating their intellectual ability and are approaching the levels of men in educational and intellectual attainment.

However, women with family responsibilities find their upward movement is often hampered as they fight for time to devote to both career and family. An important feature of professional and especially managerial work are the long working hours that seem to be required to gain recognition and eventual promotion. Furthermore, women also need to work on the C-suite skills like business acumen, ability to negotiate assertively, strategic thinking, lead senior staff and invest in leadership talk time and also to manage adversity.

Several women and probably some men think that women are bad negotiators.  This perception hardly comes as a surprise as women compared to men are on average paid less and occupies fewer leadership positions. On the other hand, research suggest that a women’s negotiation outcomes are claimed to be more a consequence of learned gender behavior than of genetic imprint.  Indeed, women have great potential to become great negotiators if they are understoodand given the opportunity and also if they overcome a few internal and external gender barriers.

The other question of whether having women on boards is a good thing is now a subject for much debate. Earlier research is contradictory: a paper in the Journal of Financial Economics, “Women in the Boardroom and their Impact on Governance and Performance”, contended that where management is already good, it is better to leave well alone rather than tamper with gender balance, though in cases of weak governance female directors brought improvement, because they tended to exercise stronger oversight and there is also the belief of many senior business leaders that women have a beneficial effect on the character and culture of the boardroom.
 

Conclusion

In the final analysis setting quotas, introducing legislation may not be the best way to increase the number of women in leadership roles. Because it may not be fair to men to have men pay for social justice by promoting disproportionate number of women and also to women to take jobs where they may not be the most qualified and where gender gives them an advantage.

Instead what we need is to make sure that the talent pipeline is filled with competent women in school and early jobs.  This increases the pool of women and ultimately should increase the number of women being qualified and available for key jobs. This may take some time, but it will ensure that our country’s entire work force is engaged productively and inclusively.