Do Women Aspire To Lead?
Although things might be getting better for women in the workplace, it's disheartening and unacceptable that women still report many of the same arcane barriers to their success.
Judy Olian is dean of Penn State's Smeal College of Business and a leading expert in strategic human resources management.
Fortune magazine organizes an annual powwow of the top 50 corporate female leaders and other senior female executives. It is tempting to infer from such a high-powered gathering that women have shattered the glass ceiling and are advancing in significant numbers to head some of the largest and most complex organizations in the private and public sectors.
Not so fast. Fortune’s annual conference is targeted at super-women. Unfortunately, they are the exception rather than the norm when it comes to breaking into the uppermost ranks of corporate America.
You’re probably familiar with the statistics. For example, only eight women head Fortune 500 corporations; among the top earners in U.S. corporations, 5.2 percent are women; and only 13 percent of board directors are female.
Why does the attainment of women at the top still lag so far behind that of men? Recent reports featuring well-credentialed women opting out of the work force to raise families seem to confirm a popular notion these days, that women simply don't share the same career aspirations as men.
That’s a myth. The hypothesis that women secretly aspire to full-time motherhood is debunked in a recent survey conducted by Catalyst, the research and advisory organization focusing on women’s leadership issues.
Catalyst’s 2004 study of 700 senior women and 250 senior men, sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers, found that both genders aspire to reach the top ranks in organizations—55 percent of female and 57 percent of male respondents. Interestingly, 26 percent of these senior female executives and 29 percent of the males said they don’t want the top job. The rest weren’t sure.
Aspirations for the top job were especially strong among executives in line positions—82 percent of women and 77 percent of men. That’s not surprising since line positions offer the most immediate springboard into the top management team. And it makes no difference whether women have children or not—they’re just as likely to hunger for the CEO job.
Catalyst reports that men and women reference some of the same factors necessary for success—that to succeed an executive must exceed performance expectations, successfully manage others, assume the right, high-profile assignments, and possess recognized expertise. But there are also some important differences between the genders. Women, for example, say it’s critical to develop a style with which male managers are comfortable and to develop a network of relationships. Men are much more likely to note willingness to relocate and international experience as critical success factors. In general, women tend to emphasize relationships as key strategies for success, while men focus on experiences and assignments.
A majority of women, and men to a lesser extent, report difficulty achieving work-life balance. More women note that they have had to put their personal goals on hold in order to obtain career successes. For example, these senior women are much more likely to have decided not to have children (27 percent, versus 3 percent of the men) or to postpone having children (20 percent, versus 10 percent of the men).
If these senior women aspire to the same organizational leadership positions as men, and have incurred greater personal costs than men in the interest of their careers, why then have women’s achievements as a group lagged behind that of men?
It’s the same old story. These accomplished women report being excluded from informal networks, experiencing plain old stereotyping, lack of role models, and an inhospitable corporate culture. The only “objective” factor they perceive holding them back was their lack of line experience but that, too, may be the result of unfair exclusion.
The better news is that 65 percent of women (compared to 82 percent of men) believe that opportunities for women have at least somewhat improved over the last five years. OK—so things might be a little better, but isn’t it disheartening, not to mention unacceptable, that women still report experiencing such arcane barriers to their success?
