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Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership Harvard Business Review

“Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership” by A. Early and L. Carli The ‘Glass barrier’ is no longer the right metaphor for the absence of women in the highest levels of business hierarchy. It fails to incorporate the complexity and variety of challenges women can face in their journey to leadership. The labyrinth as a metaphor: routes for women to become a leader exist but are full of twists and turns. ⇾ Many barriers and obstacles make up the labyrinth. Walls all around The various barriers and obstacles making up the labyrinth: - Vestiges of prejudice:

- Wage discrimination - Promotion that come more slowly for women than for men: even in feminine settings men ascend to supervisory positions more quickly than women, even though they are of equivalent qualifications.

- General bias against women with equal strength at all levels - Resistance to women’s leadership: a set of conscious and unconscious mental associations about women and men in leadership positions.

- Communal qualities: associated with women; being affectionate, friendly, kind. ⇾ Women are bound double; if they are too communal they are criticised, if they are too agentic, they are criticised. Men do not have this problem, they are more free. ⇾ Being dominant is additionally seen as a more damaging quality for women than for men.

- Agentic qualities: associated with men; conveying assertion and control, being ambitious

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and dominant. ⇾ These agents qualities are associated with good leadership Issues of leadership style: female leaders struggle to cultivate an effective leadership style. It is hard for them to reconcile the preferred communal qualities with the expected agentic qualities,

- Transformational leader: establish yourself as a role model gaining followers and trust ⇾ State goals, innovate, mentor, empower. ⇾ More female style; they adopt collaboration and participation

- Transactional leader: establish give-take-relationships that appeal to self-interest ⇾ Manage in the conventional way, clarify employee’s responsibility, reward objectives and correct failure. ⇾ More masculine style

- Lassiez-faire style: a leader that concerns with neither of above stated styles but still has -

authority. More likely to be done by men. Demands of family life: women are more likely to interrupt careers for their family which leads to slower career progress. Additionally some decision makers think it inappropriate to give mothers demanding positions due to their mother-responsibilities.

By Simone Smolders

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Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership

- Underinvestment in social capital: social capital seems to be the most important for climbing higher on the organisational hierarchy ladder, but balancing work with family life leaves women with little time for socialising and building a professional network. Additionally, since these networks are mainly composed of men integrating can be hard for females. Management Interventions that work What does management need to do in the face of this multifaceted problem: - Increase awareness of the psychological drivers of prejudice towards female leaders and work against them - Change the long-hours norm: to assess member’s contributions managers may resort to look at the hours they spend at work. This needs to shift to reward and encourage women who work highly productive in less time due to family demands. - Reduce the subjectivity of performance evaluation: evaluations needs to be more objective to reduce effects of prejudice in hiring and promoting - Use open-recruitment tools rather than informal networks to fill positions - Ensure a mass of women in executive positions: token women tend to be stereotyped which limits their options to rise. When they are not a small minority the fact that they are female becomes less salient - Avoid having a sole female member of any team: when corporations want to promote diversity they distribute women among many different teams, leaving them outnumbered by men who tend to ignore them. The higher females climb, the more they find themselves in gender-imbalanced teams. Help shore up social capital - Prepare women for line management with demanding assignments: challenging work improves overall retention of women and increases the number of women in management positions. - Establish family-friendly human resource practices: set up practices that help women to stay in their jobs when they start a family - Allow employees who have patronal responsibility to prove worthy of promotion: provide more time - Encourage male participation in family-friendly benefits When we view a labyrinth from above, it becomes more tractable: women should know about the barrier to make more informed choices. Additionally, it is actually only a matter of time: - The common perception nowadays is that women will gain greater access to leadership roles in the future - With social change naturally comes conflict - Gender discrimination become less and less present

By Simone Smolders

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Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership...