BT Business Essence of the Entrepreneur awards
Smashing through the glass ceiling
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.
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