Women in senior management: is the glass ceiling still intact?

This paper examines the barriers that hinder women’s progress to senior and board-level positions in organisations. It is based on qualitative data from interviews with individual senior women collected in five countries: Germany, Greece, Sweden, the UK and the USA. After considering the literature on issues such as gender stereotyping, perceptions of female management style, personal style, tokenism, networking, and childcare, the paper examines whether the situation has changed and whether there are any differences between countries. While barriers remain, particularly in areas such as tokenism, difficulties in networking, perceptions of senior women, and overall confidence of women in senior positions, improvements were identified in areas such as organisational culture, women’s ability to gain the right type of experience and issues around combining work and childcare. Some national differences emerged, although, overall, the experiences of the women in the countries studied were similar in terms of the barriers they had encountered and how they had tried to overcome them.

Keywords:

Tokenism Glass Ceiling, Women,

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