Top Gender Barriers Women Face at Work
Did you know...
Women hold more than 50 percent of professional and management positions today.
Yet most of these jobs are at the middle-management level and lower.
What keeps women from cracking the glass ceiling and finding seats in the
boardroom?
Author Connie Glaser offers several reasons:
Women frequently do not seek or are not promoted to positions that
have profit-and-loss responsibilities. "Women are promoted
into training, human resources and other positions that are essential but
are not on the side of operations or sales - positions where there's monetary
authority and responsibility."
Women often are excluded from informal networking. "It's
not deliberate. It's unusual to invite women to go to the cigar bar, the
golf game, the sports event. It's part of the male culture, but a lot of
women are excluded, either because it's not of interest to them or it's assumed
it isn't."
Gender-based stereotypes continue to play a part in decision-making. "A
Woman with a family may not be considered for an overseas position on the
assumption that her husband won't leave his job. A woman who has just had
a child may not be considered for a promoting because there's an assumption
that her priority is her child. That may be the case, but maybe not."
Companies lose a tremendous amount of female talent by not acknowledging
that there may be a period when a woman wants to plateau or step off the
work cycle for a while. "To keep them, it's important to
keep the re-entry on-ramps available to women."
Men seem more comfortable promoting themselves because it's part
of the culture in which they grew up. "That leaves women
to figure out strategies to support and promote one another. Women are
more prone to do a good job and wait to be recognized for it than to promote
themselves."