Supporting Women#s Career Advancement: Challenges and Opportunities

Citation

Burke, R.J. (2006), "Supporting Women#s Career Advancement: Challenges and Opportunities", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 14 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2006.04414dae.002

Supporting Women#s Career Advancement: Challenges and Opportunities

Supporting Women’s Career Advancement: Challenges and Opportunities

Ronald J. Burke, Mary Mattis,Edward Elgar, 2005

The five parts to this book report on the past, present and future of women’s career development. The book presents research on work, career and life experience, examines ongoing challenges and best practices for advancing women, and describes two company initiatives for advancing women.

Part 1 provides the backdrop, starting with Ronald Burke’s review on progress and obstacles to women’s career advancement. We learn good news and bad news. For readers steeped in this research, many of the themes will be disturbingly familiar. The pay rates for men and women are still different, women are not figuring much on the boards of private-sector companies, women are still leaving organizations to start their own businesses, integrating family life comes at a career cost, gender stereotyping is alive and well, and male chief executives and senior women disagree about the barriers.

Generational differences shift the ground somewhat for high-achieving women – earlier it was how to fit in and be accepted, now it is how to be a woman leader. At the more positive end of the spectrum, more women are visible in leading roles (ask any red-blooded New Zealand male, who sees himself surrounded by women in leadership roles, including the Prime Minister, Governor-General, Chief Justice and Speaker of the House). And for those in organizations, Burke provides the really good news that relevant HRM change initiatives are being increasingly linked to organizational effectiveness.

It is always refreshing to see a contributor from the Antipodes, and Phyllis Tharenou continues with the global view, exploring the perennial issue of women’s under-representation in management.

Worldwide, women on average comprise 20 percent of managers, with the highest proportion being 45 percent in the US … the higher the management level, the lower the proportion of women (p. 31).

Her analysis, using individual, social and organizational influences, has produced a table which is a practitioner’s delight (Table 3.2, pp. 53-54). There are findings to shake some of the fundamentals – for example, while mentors help men they do not seem to help women in the same way to advance to top levels; there is no evidence to suggest that family-friendly practices increase women’s advancement in management, but women-friendly cultures do. It was good to see the final recommendation, that women choose organizations with cultures conducive to advancement on merit, came with the cogent reminder that the women’s success in the US mentioned earlier could be explained by their acceptance that the problem rests in the context, not the individual.

The final chapter in part 1 suggests that the glass ceiling is an artifact of women’s career-life choices. The chapter includes a useful generational perspective and an example from the southern hemisphere (p. 70). The first chapter in part 2 incorporates research from The Netherlands and Spain, and focuses on how perceptions influence the careers of men and women. There is a satisfying discussion on leadership styles and effectiveness – the facts and the beliefs. The chapter reaffirms that leadership images, for men and women, continue to be gendered.

Other contributors provide provocation and stimulation. Marie Line Germain and Terri Scandura advance the role of self-determination in choosing a mentor. Their chapter adds productively to the mentoring literature and practice. Formal mentoring programs are so popular in organizations that organizers of these would be pleased to mitigate failure by advocating self-choice. Any baby-boomer, particularly a woman of middle age who daily experiences the phenomenon of being invisible, will welcome the chapter that spotlights them as an important part of the workforce, yet overlooked in the research. Chapter 7, “Women at midlife: changes, challenges and contributions”, argues that midlife women “do more than simply adjust previous behaviors and attitudes; they reset the standard, changing the benchmark against which they assess their attitudes, actions and relationships” (p. 129). Thank you, Judith Gordon and Karen Whelan-Berry.

But it was the first chapter in part 3, “Ongoing challenges”, that fully met my expectations as a career coach. Recently, a chief-executive client asked me to work with a young woman employee who had handed in her notice because her workplace romance had failed. Her manager wanted her to reconsider the decision from the career as well as the personal perspective. Lisa Mainiero’s chapter on office romance was such a help. It was refreshing to know the topic is out in the open and this contributor elucidates the ethical dilemmas and the appropriateness of management actions (or inaction).

This section of the book continues to meet practitioner needs with two chapters on work-life integration. Quotes from Canadian employees tell of strategies that have worked for them. Linda Duxbury and Christopher Higgins also provide practical recommendations to employers. One that stood out was the encouragement to introduce new performance measures that focus on objectives, results and outputs, to “move away from a focus on hours and presenteeism to a focus on output” (p. 206). Work-life balance is another familiar theme and this time the research is from a field where 70 percent of the workforce are women and there is a crippling shortage of expertise. Health-care case studies illustrate six practices that are working well in the US. Busy organization people will find Peter Weil and Cynthia Kivland’s writing very accessible.

The final sections combine best practice and company initiatives for advancing women. I suspect that these chapters will have the most appeal for a human-resource manager or a consultant. Success stories with enough headings, bullet points and boxes will keep a non-academic reading beyond his or her usual cut-off point. A large corporate highlights its diversity program’s success:

… today women comprise the majority of the Shell Oil leadership team – an unusual phenomenon in an industry that traditionally has been dominated and led by males (p. 325).

The training-and-development reader will eagerly read about the success of Procter & Gamble’s workshop entitled, “Sex@work.shop”. And for the organization person trying to convince others about diversity, Leslie Levin deals with how to market gender and diversity initiatives.

Mary Mattis and Katherine Giscombe, in their respective chapters on engineers and women of color, not only provide case studies and easy-to-read lists of “doables” but also tackle with verve two of the outstanding tough areas. Recently, a colleague was mentioning issues facing one of her mentees in an engineering company. This young woman had been raised in New Zealand during the “girls can do anything” campaign. Guiding her to a gendered analysis might take time, but the relief when she sees her experience is not personal inadequacy but blind spots within the profession, will pay dividends. I suggested reading Mary Mattis, the co-editor of this book. The young woman would gain understanding as well as practical strategies.

While the picture looks brighter for some women in the corporate world, particularly in the countries featured in this book, Katherine Giscombe reminds us that women of color experience “a double outsider status in the workplace” (p. 267). Stereotypes associated with race and other barriers produce a “concrete ceiling”. Seven change-management elements are presented as a framework for action. They are illustrated with company examples, such as IBM’s Asian-value proposition and Verizon’s performance-management process. Given my experience that, for organizational change to occur, it has to start within individuals, I welcomed the inclusion of a meaty section on the key role of middle managers. Searching questions help individual managers to assess their organizations, their policies, work environment and, most importantly, themselves. I was especially taken with the suggestion to join an organization in which you are a minority (p. 290). During a year spent in the US I volunteered at Head Start, a pre-school program for black American children, in South Carolina. In a small but unforgettable way, I learnt about being an outsider.

The editors present academic research and writing which has practical relevance. I urge the leading thinkers and researchers who have contributed to this book to keep providing women with new career steps and strategies – and keep challenging organizations to reduce the length and slowness of the “long, slow, uphill struggle” (p. 8).

Reviewed by Mary Cull, management consultant, Tall Poppies, Wellington, New Zealand.

A longer version of this review was originally published in Women in Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 1, 2006.