Leadership and Gender Differences

The evolution of women's managerial careers

Before speaking about women's leadership, we thought it would be useful to analyse women's relationship with their own career paths, as it was presented in several recent studies conducted all over the world.

In the past few years, women have increasingly expressed their desire to develop their careers, while the percentage of working women has also increased. At the same time, there have been favourable changes with regard to their presence in domains in which, till not long ago, women were accessing with difficulty.

A recent survey conducted by the ILO's Bureau for Employers' Activities (ACT/EMP) (2013) among around 1300 private sector companies in 39 developing countries showed the extent to which the companies have policies and measures in place to promote women in management. And these policies were not created only as a result of a need for minimizing the problems created due to gender discrimination. They are, instead, based on an increasing and extremely important awareness that women have great results in the organizations they lead. That explains the conclusion of a study made by Catalyst (conducted in 2008), according to which the percentage of women in managerial positions has seen a constant increase from 13.8% in 1950 to 26.1% in 1980 and to more than 50% nowadays.

Still, it should be noted that, in reality, when women are part of management, they usually find themselves in the middle of the pyramid and rarely at the top. They are underrepresented in the well-paid job sector and it will take some time until this imbalance changes. Furthermore, there is still a considerable gap between men and women earnings. In addition, even if some authors advanced the idea that women and men are equal from the point of view of education in many occupational fields, US Bureau of Labor Statistics still shows that women obtain only 80% of men's incomes. This inequality affects women at various professional levels. At a high level, women are less preferred for the managerial and professional positions and for the positions involving decision-making regarding the policy of the company.

On a global level, women's involvement in the management structures is shown in Table 1. The results indicate that in just four countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway and United Kingdom) women represent over 20% of board members; in 13 countries, between 10% and 20%; in 14 countries, between 5% and 10%, and in 13 countries, <5%.

We can also look at the percentage of men and women in management positions in different sectors, as shown in Table 2.

It is quite easy to observe that women are a large percentage of management in the HR, Public Relations and Communications; there is quite a balanced approach in the Finance and Administration departments, whereas women represent a minority in the Research and Development of new products and especially in Sales and Operations. The f also shows a strong imbalance for women when looking at the General Manager position.

Table 1 Percentage of board seats held by women, 2013, Catalyst Inc. Knowledge Center.

This sort of gender difference can be traced back to the education system. If we look at the young people's options in terms of University degrees and their trends, we can predict future trends. In Figure 1, we can look at some key information regarding graduate distribution in countries all over the world.

Table 2. Percentage of companies with women and men in different types of management, International Labour Organization.

As it can be seen from Figure 1, the positive evolution that has been recorded over the past few years in terms of an increased involvement of women in business and management did not create a perfect overall balance. So, it is obvious that we should expect a continuous future acceleration of this phenomenon.

We have presented this situation not only in order to characterize a certain facet of the current business environment but also to show that women's presence, scarce as it is, has allowed specialists to observe the way in which they behave in leadership roles, as well as their competencies and potential in that sort of position. We did not expect to see big percentages of women as leaders. We also consider that gender stereotypes are still part of global culture and are a big reason for this current situation because this results also from practice and other studies.

The feeling that we are unable to actively help solving this gender imbalance in leadership positions is certainly not a very comfortable one, which is why we thought it would be useful to redistribute some opinions that validate the results of women as leaders. In our opinion, it is quite revealing that, according to many analyses, employees view female leaders better than male ones in several characteristics regarding transformational leadership (charisma, motivational skills, creativity, problem solving, and several other key skills that show leadership efficiency). Furthermore, Eagly has evidenced that, according to research, teams with a female leader are more willing to make an extra effort, are more satisfied with their leader and their teams are in many cases more efficient when compared with teams with a male manager. All the information currently at our disposal regarding women's ability to act as efficient leaders still does not answer this question: how is there still so much data showing a serious discrepancy between genders in terms of leadership, when women leaders are currently viewed much better by the management than they were previously, perhaps even better than their male counterparts? This paradox seems to be a reflection of our current historical context and proves that, despite the fact that the social roles of women are rapidly changing, there is still a traditional cultural expectation which continues to be the norm.

Figure 1. Increase in percentage of graduates in engineering, manufacturing, and constructions who are women, selected countries, 2000–2012, International Labour Organization.