Women in high places:

When and why promoting women into top positions can harm them individually or as a group



Introduction1

Literature Review1

Glass Ceiling Effect2

Queen Bee Effect3

Conclusion4

References5

Women in high places:

When and why promoting women into top positions can harm them individually or as a group

Introduction

In present era, women have advanced in almost all fields of work and education. They are participating equally in labor markets and also form the equal proportion in higher education. Despite these advances, women are found to still be underrepresented in the executive positions. This is evident from the fact that only 15% of the companies included in Fortune 500 have women at board director positions according to the data of 2008. Also according to European Commission (2010), only 3% of total companies in EU have women in key position and the number of women at board member position is 1 out of every 10.

The concern remains for this social inequality despite the growing number of diversity programs and quotas at the workplace. The gender differences in the leadership and top most positions in the organizations are still the topic of great interest for the researchers particularly after the promotion of workforce diversity. The purpose of this research paper is to explore the existing literature that discusses the issues women face at the top positions in the organization. The paper also discusses the major causes due to which the women harm themselves as an individual or as a group while managing at the leadership position

Literature Review

The studies on gender roles show that men and women act completely different in work environment (Laff, 2008). Various studies have discussed the major reasons of the fact that women are still major part of the middle management but unable to form majority at the top most positions. These include family related barriers, gender stereotypes (Ryan & Haslam, 2007) and many more. In this paper, the most crucial reasons are discussed.

Glass Ceiling Effect

A major reason of the inability of women to reach top most positions in the organization is the stereotypical believe that they are not as motivated as men regarding the career. The reason of low motivation levels is the responsibility of being the primary caretaker at home. These believe presents a distorted view of the women ability to reach the leadership positions. However researchers agree that women themselves believe in this view unintentionally. Thus the belief are followed by the women themselves.

Another believe in this aspect is that the recruitment processes that are more formalized tend to select the individuals without any gender discrimination (Reskin and McBrier, 2000). However, the women believe that when recruitment is carried out through informal networks, men favor women at managerial positions which lead to significant discrimination. However, this idea is not accepted in many studies which reveal that female managers themselves do not recruit females in order to maintain their positions particularly in male dominant industries. In this way the women are able to maintain their social status among fellow ...