Find out how far women have come in management, what's holding them back and why.

On the up?

Between 1974 and 1998 the number of women company directors increased by a stunning 600 per cent. An example of women smashing through the glass ceiling? Proof that women have now finally got it all? Well, not exactly. By 1998 the number of women company directors had increased to an all time high of… 3.6 per cent! Less than four in every hundred directors are women. The situation is slightly better in lower management grades, nearly one in five (18 per cent) of all managers are women.

Stuck in a rut

Women have entered into junior management grades in increasing numbers in the last 25 years – the increase in women managers from 1974 to 1998 was 1,000 per cent – and around half of all women at work have a female boss. But the higher up an organisations hierarchy you go, the fewer women you see. And in male dominated industries women managers are few and far between – nearly nine in ten men working in the UK have a male boss. Even in female dominated sectors like nursing men are more likely to be promoted than women. Although there are more women managers in nursing than men, a disproportionate number of men who go into nursing rise to senior grades.

This is what people mean when they talk about a glass ceiling. Women are starting to move up into management positions, but they reach a certain point and don’t seem to go any further. So what’s happening? Women managers themselves surveyed by Ashridge Management Centre named stereotypes and assumptions about what they would and wouldn’t do as the single most important factor that had held them back in their careers. In contrast men said it was the lack of a sponsor or mentor that had held them back. Unfortunately discrimination still seems to be a problem at senior levels, particularly when appointments are made informally without a proper recruitment procedure. But one of the biggest barriers to women is the long hours expected of senior managers, which make it difficult to combine a management role with other responsibilities, particularly children.

The factors

The long hours culture is so common in the UK, that many people assume that it’s inevitable. When women talk about wanting flexible or family friendly hours they are seen as at best unrealistic and at worst uncommitted to the company. Few people question whether these long hours are necessary, or whether people might actually work better if they had more time off. In many workplaces there is a macho ‘culture of presenteeism’; you have to be seen to be there, and nobody wants to be the one to go home on time, let alone early. But in many European countries the opposite is true – if your car is still in the car park after six o’clock it’s a sign of failure, proof that you can’t do your job properly.

Women are still suffering from the assumption that the average employee is a man, with a wife at home to look after his children, and arrange his social life so that he doesn’t have to worry about losing touch with friends and family. This doesn’t work for women, and increasingly it doesn’t work for men either, who don’t want to have the distant relationship with their children they had with their own father, and whose female partners are not willing to take on the full burden of childcare and housework. Ultimately smashing the glass ceiling is about re-thinking the balance between work and home, recognising that a change in hours is not just better for women, it’s better for men too.