Women are also:
It’s not just me making such bold claims. Check out these pages from a booklet (circa 1940) that was intended to assist male bosses in supervising their new female employees at RCA plants. The images come from the collection of the U.S. National Archives Southeast Region.
One piece of advice: Avoid horseplay or “kidding”; she may resent it.
Alas the “glass ceiling” is one of those sad facts of modern organizational life that knows no national boundaries. Doesn’t matter the country: despite rising female labour participation rates, women can’t seem to crack senior management ranks.
There are the usual reasons: the lack of transparency around promotion policies; work-family conflict; the old boys’ network; and the lack of visibly successful female role models. In her study of female managers in Ireland, Christine Cross (U Limerick) found similar dynamics at play but also what she calls an under-appreciated phenomenon: that “visibility” or being known to the senior management team is a crucial “career progression strategy.”
It is a strategy for which women of a certain age are ill-equipped, Cross says. “The age during which women are most often taking time out of their career for childbirth coincides with the time they are most active in seeking promotion,” she writes in the Leadership & Organization Development Journal. “As a consequence of taking maternity leave, a woman’s absence from the organisation directly impacts her visibility in organisational life. This study highlights that where women are away from the office for these extended periods, they believe, because of their absence, they are ‘forgotten about’ by the senior management team.”
Cross’s conclusions are based on in-depth interviews with 30 female managers from across a wide range of industry sectors in Ireland. The women in the study also observed that men in their organizations overtly engaged in self-generated visibility, a strategy the female respondents did not want to employ.
Hmm. . . do you buy that?
I have seen the way some men network and it’s not a pretty sight. Everyone knows they are doing it, just to get in with the ‘in crowd’. People talk about them behind their backs about how they are always smoozing up to the most senior people, and there is this one guy who is really junior, but wants to hang out with the ‘big boys’. But it’s working for him, even though we are all saying he shouldn’t be doing it because he’s making a laughing stock of himself.
—Retail store manager quoted by Cross
“Barriers to the executive suite: evidence from Ireland”, by Christine Cross; Leadership & Organization Development Journal (Vol. 31 No. 2, 2010, pp. 104-119)
photo credit: Let Ideas Compete
Although working women are piling up educational credentials and experience, in far too many organizations they are still butting up against a glass ceiling. These invisible barriers to upward mobility can come in various forms: lack of mentoring of women, gender stereotyping, and views that men make more effective leaders. In the U.S., women holding the titles of chairman, CEO, COO, and executive vice president remain at about 7 percent of the population of executives.
While many possible causes of the glass ceiling have been studied, one overlooked area is managers’ perceptions of women’s work and family demands. Researchers Jenny M. Hoobler, Sandy J. Wayne, and Grace Lemmon (U of Illinois at Chicago) designed a study to test two ideas: whether managers view women as having more difficulty than men executing their work roles due to family responsibilities; and whether women, based on this perception, are viewed as less suitable for promotion. The study was based on a sample of 126 female subordinates and 52 male and female managers from one midwestern-U.S. division of a Fortune 100 transportation firm.
The result was conclusive: “Even though female employees actually reported slightly less family-work conflict than their male counterparts,” the researchers write in the Academy of Management Journal, “their managers still perceived them as having greater family-work conflict, a perception that had significant implications for women’s organizational advancement.” (These biases held for both male and female managers.) Because of these perceptions, managers rated women lower on job and organizational fit and performance.
“We have uncovered a critical dimension of the social role expectations that play a key role in the upward progress of female workers,” the researchers write. “Furthermore, we feel that such stereotyping is quite significant, with strong ramifications for people and organizations, given that these perceptions affect important managerial decisions.”
If these results are a true reflection of what is going on in organizations, there are a couple of practical implications.
One, to reduce or eliminate the impact of gender on managers’ perceptions of family-work conflict, managers must be made aware of their potential to stereotype. This is not simply a male-female issue. As the investigators note, “Male managers have been said to be gatekeepers of the upper echelons of management, yet we found that female managers held family-work conflict stereotypes about female subordinates as well.”
Two, women who participate in company-sponsored programs that assist employees with managing family-work conflict may be signaling to their managers that they need help balancing home and work domains. Given prevailing stereotypes, this would likely kill their opportunities to be promoted.
Bosses’ perceptions of family-work conflict and women’s promotability: Glass ceiling effects,” by Jenny M Hoobler, Sandy J. Wayne, and Grace Lemmon; Academy of Management Journal (2009, Vol. 52, No. 5, 939–957)
photo credit: Sal Petruzelli Marino
In this video clip, INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra discusses perceptions of women being relatively weak at “envisioning,” essentially the ability to articulate a vision of the future and translating it into a strategic direction.
Ibara’s study is based on 360-degree evaluations of some 2,000 male and female managers. Prevailing wisdom is that there is a bias against female managers, who are generally rated less favourably than their male counterparts. Not so fast: Ibarra found that women score higher than men on many measures (such as communication, emotional intelligence, feedback) except for one: envisioning.
Yes, this is perception and not reality, but “when it comes to senior management,” she points out, “perception is reality.” (3:15 mark)
At the 4:00 mark, Ibarra says it is possible the way in which women arrive at a new vision is simply different than the process used by men (consensus versus going to the mountaintop), and that this organic process is not as evident.
At 6:10, she wonders if some women prefer to stick to the facts rather than striking out with a bold vision because they are often in a more vulnerable position in organizations.
And at 8:50, she talks about the “identity trap” in which men and women often find themselves: being pigeon-holed as an expert in one area. One way to escape this trap is to get out of the office to enlarge your perspectives with your network and do some “pattern recognition” in other areas. (11:24).
In these times of globalization, we often hear how important it is to cultivate a diverse workforce. But we also know there is a gulf between words and deeds, with diversity policy often little more than legal cover to protect against charges of discrimination. The question is, how effective are HR diversity management practices in organizations?
That’s the question posed by Australian academics Shen, Chanda, D’Netto, and Monga, in The International Journal of Human Resource Management. After an exhaustive review of research to date, they make these three conclusions:
1. Despite growing commitment to “equal employment opportunity” in many organizations, there is still widespread discrimination. “This is evidenced by low employment of women and minorities and the lack of minority representation at higher organizational levels. Also, female and minority employees are always disadvantaged in training, performance appraisals and remuneration.”
2. HR diversity is often restricted to “hiring by numbers.” Little is done in areas such as training, management development, and individual-based appraisal and pay. “Often, minority employees are recruited for lower positions and provided few promotion opportunities. . . While many organizations provide diversity training most training programmes reinforce norms and values of the dominant organizational culture.”
3. HR diversity management is primarily focussed on equality and fairness. Most organizations do not really have effective diversity management practices that value and make use of diversity, or that “unleash the potential of the diverse workforce they employ.”
And here’s a reality check: The authors note that there is no empirically proven association of HRM diversity practices with increases in diversity and improved organizational performance. And researchers have not investigated what HRM approaches are appropriate to manage diversity effectively.
Managing diversity through human resource management: an international perspective and conceptual framework, by Shen, Chanda, D’Netto, and Monga; The International Journal of Human Resource Management (20:2,235 — 251)
Email me for a copy of this paper: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com
