Why is the Glass Ceiling So Difficult to Break?
Although women have taken major strides in reaching higher rungs on the corporate ladder, they still occupy less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEO seats and even less positions as the heads of boards in the EU (Paustian-Underdahl). At this point, we’re all familiar with the gender pay gap question, but what happens to women’s numbers in senior and executive positions? Why do women struggle to move beyond managerial positions in the workplace? Are there any fundamentally biased corporate hiring practices or preferences that restrict aspiring female executives from succeeding? It is crucial to examine the longevity of full-time labor in men and women to understand why women are underrepresented at the top of the corporate ladder. How can variables like race, education level, gender and age affect women in terms of networking? Let’s explore the various factors that influence a woman’s ability to achieve elite positions.
Due to the relative homogeneity of male executive managers, the challenge of isolating the pure effect of gender on standard employee compensations from all other factors can be difficult. One huge advantage that studying executive compensation has had is the overall ease of finding compensation data, since all publicly traded companies of the US must release this info (Shin). Some data reveals more about what having women in executive positions can do to the gender pay gap of the entire corporation. For example, rather than having women in top management, greater numbers of women on the board of directors is shown to boost the compensation of women in top management, lessening the pay gap among high executives (Shin).
In addition to the underrepresentation of women in executive positions as a whole, women are also much more likely to be managing companies specializing in social services, health, and trade (Bertrand). At first look, this may seem to concur with our findings in our first piece on the underrepresentation of women in STEM. However, this alleged segregation shows no definitive data to suggest systematic placement of women in any low-wage industries (Bertrand).
Aside from these findings, a woman’s lifestyle choices, namely the one to become a mother, can take a huge toll on her ability to enhance her position and her compensation. Lack of flexible work arrangements to support a woman’s motherhood is immensely detrimental to her chances of being considered for promotional opportunities, and she often struggles to build momentum when re-entering her career (Johns). In addition to all of the crazy demands of childbearing, women suffer from societal paradigms that see motherhood and maternal leave as the “death" of a woman’s career. This is devastating to women’s aspirations of being hired as senior managers and executives, especially due to all the constant labor, networking, and momentum that is needed to build(or rebuild) one’s image.
Speaking of networking, much of the informal networking that serves as a crucial pipeline for promotion tends to exclude women. This is where some of the gendered trends in behavior, character and mindset come into play. In the healthcare industry, an estimated 48 percent of men have lunch with other managers on a monthly basis, as opposed to 33 percent of women (Johns). This disparity(and other similar ones) in networking often stems from differences in confidence and long-term ambition between men and women, which also contributes to the lack of women in higher positions. Sponsors can promote and sell skills to larger figureheads in an organization, assisting to combat the challenges of being promoted. Women tend to downplay the importance of having a sponsor or simply fail to capitalize off of them, which may be partially attributed to the reluctance to negotiate with senior male sponsors, since it is often misunderstood as a sexual interest (Johns).
To combat all of the above challenges of. building momentum, women often need employers with commitments to gender diversity and equity before the glass ceiling can be broken (Johns). Companies that have been successful in dismantling barriers to entry(for women) tend to display these characteristics: tracking of progress, addressing preconceptions and stereotypes, encourage effective pipelines that promote women, create flexible work arrangements(especially for mothers), and enforce mentorship programs (Johns). Even with all of these resources and committees set forth to help break the glass ceiling, many companies still struggle with reaching parity(or even with ameliorating the gap). These studies suggest that gender diversity must comprise the fundamental work culture in order to make significant progress.
Stepping back from the practices that can assist companies in balancing men and women in higher positions, it may be feasible to say that men are more naturally suited towards these senior and executive level positions. But if this is true, how so? All of the fundamental arguments still stand as we mentioned earlier: women are hindered by their motherhood; they often lack networking partners and sponsors to promote themselves effectively; they face gender discrimination and are held to higher standards of evaluation for overall competence; they lack mentors and role models in large corporate offices to inspire them to aim higher; they generally tend to be less consistent in their full-time labor as they get older(while men tend to stay quite consistent at older ages). But beyond all of these deterrents that women struggle with, men tend to benefit from implicit demands of work culture in terms of hiring in general and executive hiring in particular.
Many studies have been undertaken to remove potential biases from associating a gender with elite leadership positions. RCT, or randomized control trials, act as balancing measures to view gendered positions of leadership without institutional biases and stereotypes(i.e. like how managers are thought to be men, secretaries are thought of as women). RCT emphasizes the importance of an appropriate fit between the demands of leader roles and the gendered behavior of the aspiring applicant, estimating the success of male and female leaders on how closely they can replicate these leadership demands (Paustian-Underdahl).
Organizations with men as the majority and demand a masculine culture produce inherent barriers for women due to the incongruity of these demands with societal expectations of women (Paustian-Underdahl). These implicit barriers are shown to hold true for organizations dominated by women as well, which are considered to be more feminine in culture and in which more women are represented than men (Paustian-Underdahl). Due to the nature of most elite networks in today’s companies, much of the balancing problem is rooted in the vast majority of businesses sustaining a masculine culture and strongly insisting on male figureheads at elite levels.
One point of contention in literature on gender and leadership is the use of self-ratings versus other ratings of leadership skills. Due to the traditional, historical view of women as homemakers and men as breadwinners over the years, shifting past gender role paradigms can be a hidden challenge (Paustian-Underdahl). This is because employees have instilled such ideas for years, and men often rate themselves as highly suited in a workplace environment while dissociating women from the workplace (Paustian-Underdahl). Similar to trends in behavior during job interviews, women tend to rate their performance more consistently with peers and colleagues, while men tend to overrate and boast about their performance, which often comes from their overall higher self-esteem (Paustian-Underdahl).
We’ve examined numerous reasons why women struggle to make it to the top. But how much harder is the journey for women of color, and how does their lack of representation affect the growth of businesses?
Female executives tend to be younger than male executives, which is often criteria to lower a female executive’s wages. Robert B. Reich, a member of Obama’s transition board, emphasized that businesses that made commitments to support the success of minorities and women achieved an average annualized return on investment of 18.3 percent, as opposed to just 7.9 percent for those with more homogenous compositions (Beckwith). Due to the competitive nature among Fortune 500 companies’ elite seats, African women often face exclusion from informal networking and report having conflict relationships with other women, namely white women (Beckwith). Much of their struggle comes from the same challenges that white women face(lack of sponsors, lack of informal networking, little flexibility in work schedule, and lack of mentors), but to a greater degree since added isolation exacerbates their chances to be visibly successful and gain momentum with networking (Beckwith).
After taking all of these arguments into account, it is feasible to say that for companies to reduce the gender pay gap for elite positions, a deliberate, focused effort must be put forth to implement gender diversity into work culture. This is typically done through programs of mentorship, sponsorship, and peer networking. The challenges in battling traditional gender roles in the workplace coupled with demands of masculine leadership in many modern businesses contribute to the ideal archetypes of men in the hot seats. It would be easier for women to rise to these challenges if more workplaces had flexible work arrangements, but jobs demanding long hours of labor and ongoing momentum(characteristic of many higher level positions) can draw women away just by their nature. As we keep finding more and more answers to the same questions, new questions reveal themselves. How can we teach women in managerial positions to improve their workplace networking skills and embrace potential sponsors? How can we improve the gender diversity of work culture to encourage more women to aim high? How can we teach women to over-promise in interviews and boast in self ratings? If we did, would the incongruity between the behavior and societal expectations negate its benefits? Moving forward, our ability to effectively test and implement solutions to these challenges will frame the gender diversity of modern businesses.
Sources:
Beckwith, Dr. A L., et al. "The Underrepresentation of African American Women in Executive Leadership: What’s Getting in the Way?" Journal of Business Studies Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 4, 2016, pp. 117-23, jbsq.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/June_2016_9.pdf. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Bertrand, Marianne, and Kevin F. Hallock. "The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs." Cornell University ILR School, DigitalCommons@ILR, 1 Oct. 2001, digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=hrpubs. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Johns, Merida L. "Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Structural, Cultural, and Organizational Barriers Preventing Women from Achieving Senior and Executive Positions." NCBI US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, NCBI, 1 Jan. 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3544145/. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Paustian-Underdahl, Samantha C., et al. "Gender and Perceptions of Leadership Effectiveness: A Meta-Analysis of Contextual Moderators." Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 99, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1129-33, www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-a0036751.pdf. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Shin, Taekjin. "Gender and Race Inequality in Management: Critical Issues, New Evidence." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 639, 1 Jan. 2012, pp. 258-62, www.jstor.org/stable/41328600?read-now=1&seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
