Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders

Citation

(2009), "Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders", Gender in Management, Vol. 24 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/gm.2009.05324aae.001

Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders

Article Type: Bookshelf From: Gender in Management: An International Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1

Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli,Harvard Business School Press,Boston, MA,2007,Hardback,308 p.,ISBN 97-1-4221-1691,

“Leadership matters … The best leadership is found by choosing leaders from the largest pool of talent, and that includes women. … With excellence in leadership in short supply, no group, organization, or nation should tolerate the losses that follow from unfairly restricting women’s access to leadership roles” (Eagly and Carli, 2007, p. 11). This is the conclusion of Chapter 1 and summarizes the raison d’être for the book which, drawing on extensive research, provides an in-depth discussion of the factors that affect women and leadership, and presents some useful practical ideas as to how to redress the current situation. A key cultural myth and official ideology concerning most western countries is that society is, was, and should be egalitarian where everybody is entitled to a “fair go” irrespective of race, gender, or social class. For example, this ideology appears supported by evidence such as the “top” jobs in New Zealand in 2005 being held by women, including Prime Minister, Governor-General, Chief Justice, and Chief Executive Officer of the largest corporation (McGregor and Fountaine, 2006). The fragility of this notion, however, is recognized when by 2007, two of these positions were again held by men, and the latest Census results (McGregor, 2008) highlight how women are still under-represented in leadership roles in New Zealand society. It would therefore appear that breaking the glass ceiling has increasingly been the case for some women throughout the world, as evidenced in New Zealand, in Germany (where Angela Merkel is the Chancellor and in the USA (where Condoleezza Rice is the Secretary of State). Given this situation of high level achievement of individual women, Eagly and Carli argue that it is time for a new metaphor for women in leadership based on finding the way through a leadership labyrinth.

I really enjoyed reading this book – it was easy to read, very informative and gave me lots of food for thought relating to my research interests of women’s leadership in sport and academia, and – in particular – mothers. Overall, I feel that the authors convincingly make their case for reasons why the glass ceiling metaphor, which has been prevalent since 1986, is now no longer appropriate. The research they draw on in the book is predominantly North American, but the key concepts are applicable to most western countries. Eagly and Carli acknowledge that women are still significantly underrepresented in the top leadership positions across all sectors and that substantial barriers to women’s advancement into these leadership positions still exist. However, despite these barriers, both those which are obvious and others that are more covert, some women do still find a way to the top. But, because these paths may be quite circuitous, the metaphor of the labyrinth was chosen.

The book is divided into 11 chapters, covering an exhaustive range of issues which affect women’s leadership, with each chapter endeavoring to answer a specific question. Chapter 1 makes a convincing argument explaining why the glass ceiling metaphor is no longer applicable for women today. This chapter also highlights some reasons why women are still not equally represented in leadership positions, including the challenges of balancing motherhood with career, prejudice and discrimination in organizations, and the numbers of suitably qualified women available for leadership positions.

Chapter 2 highlights the current situation of the women leaders of today, providing background statistics for university qualifications held by men and women and also percentages of women employees in management, business and financial operations in the USA. Women now hold 40 percent of all managerial positions in the USA and have made inroads in political and educational settings. However, women are still paid less than men and have less authority. The notion that men are natural leaders is challenged in Chapter 3. Drawing on psychological research, Eagly and Carli show that good leadership is not sex-dependent and that personality is only one factor that influences leadership. Similarly, the research would suggest that there is a rough gender balance in the Big Five personality traits that most promote leadership – neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

The fact that women still shoulder the responsibility for most of the domestic work and therefore have less access to power and authority in society is reinforced in Chapter 4. Despite this continuing trend, there is some evidence to suggest that men are increasingly contributing to domestic responsibilities. Some interesting findings from my perspective were that mothers actually spend more time with their children now than previous generations, with “employed mothers in 2000 spending as much time interacting with their children as mothers without jobs did in 1975” (Eagly and Carli, 2007, p. 54). I found this heartening to read as my choice to be a working mother has not always met with approval as, according to some people, “I should be spending more time with my daughter”. The authors also highlight that educated women are more critical of their parenting and spend more time with their children, but this places additional challenges on mothers who may also have the most career potential. This high personal standard for parenting also affects the amount of time mothers have for leisure activity, including sport. Much has been written elsewhere about women servicing other people’s leisure particularly their children and husbands, which means they have less time for themselves (Thompson, 1999), whereas men’s leisure is not affected by children or marriage.

Although motherhood is one of the barriers women have to contend with in becoming leaders, discrimination within the workplace is still prevalent and explored in Chapter 5. Discrimination exists when women receive fewer leadership opportunities with equivalent qualifications to men. For men, being married and having children equates to higher wages, whereas the opposite is true for women. In other words, for women who are mothers their obstacles to reaching the top are increased, perhaps accounting for the fact that many women at the top of their field are either single or, if in a relationship, have no children. The situation seems to apply across all occupational fields, even those dominated by women, such as nursing, social work and librarianship. In these areas men attain senior positions faster than women, a phenomenon named the glass escalator by Williams (1992). The worrying issue highlighted in this chapter is that in most experimental studies, often conducted with university students, gender bias still exists in terms of hiring for jobs. Despite the many advances in society, in terms of perceived equal opportunities, prejudice still seems to prevail amongst young people – which raises the question of what these attitudes will mean for the future.

These prejudices are explored in depth in Chapters 6 and 7. Eagly and Carli conclude that, because men have traditionally been associated with leadership and the requisite skills linked to leadership, women – even when they do reach the top – are often confronted with questions about their ability to lead. They suggest that because of stereotypes around leadership, progress through the labyrinth is difficult because people doubt women’s leadership abilities and women “feel anxious about confirming these doubts” (Eagly and Carli, 2007, p. 94). The “double bind” that women in leadership positions face is highlighted, explaining that they are expected to be communal, warm and selfless, while at the same time being agentic, which is associated with being assertive and competent. This situation is exacerbated in male-dominated fields, such as sport and medicine. Making an impact in these areas requires incredible tenacity from women and, as highlighted in the book with the words of a “black female neurosurgeon, ‘We can’t expect to be validated as individuals, but we can make the field different for those who come behind us. We must do good work and eventually the work will speak for itself … I learned every day not to count on other’s acceptance as a measure of my worth’” (Eagly and Carli, 2007, p. 115).

So, given this situation, the question is whether women actually lead differently when they are in leadership positions. Many myths associated with gendered leadership styles exist and the research presented in this book lays many of these to rest. Overall, men and women do not differ much in their leadership styles. There is a tendency for women to have more democratic styles, but this is not always the case. It could also be argued that women’s more collaborative styles are what organizations these days need which in theory should advantage women seeking out these roles. An interesting analogy of this is provided from sport where the style of the successful coach of the Duke men’s Basketball team is described as “coaching like a woman would” (Carli and Eagly, 2007, p. 134). Given the limited differences between men and women’s leadership styles, perhaps the type of organization they work for makes a difference in achieving leadership positions.

Most organizations tend to reproduce the social structure they associate with leadership, termed homosocial reproduction by Kanter (1977). This phenomenon is particularly strong in traditionally male organizations. Women who do make it to the top are often in a minority and excluded from informal male networks, such as playing golf. Also the long hours required of work, particularly in the Fortune 500 companies, for example, often conflicts with domestic responsibilities for women. Many women with professional qualifications, such as law and medicine, drop out of the workforce due to family responsibilities and find it difficult to re-enter at a later stage (Ang and Briar, 2005; Hewlett and Luce, 2005). However, research from the United Kingdom suggests that having one women on a Board of Directors, for example, can make a difference to the financial bottom line and by adding another women more benefits accrue (Singh et al., 2007). Eagly and Carli make numerous suggestions as to ways organizations can facilitate the recruitment, development and retention of talented women for leadership positions. Among them are: providing flexible work arrangements, reforming performance evaluations and recruitment, legitimizing women’s contributions as leaders and reducing tokenism. From an individual woman’s perspective, the need is to demonstrate that one is both “agentic and communal”, and it is essential to be able to “create social capital” (Eagly and Carli, 2007, p. 161). They emphasize that women need to develop their own style of leading and quote Bella Abzug, a former US congressional representative, who stated “in my heart I believe women will change the nature of power rather than power changing the nature of women” (Eagly and Carli, 2007, p. 163). Similarly, women who do become leaders in traditionally male fields, are able to engender organizational change which enables other women to follow in their footsteps, as has been the case for mothers in elite sport leadership positions in New Zealand, for example (Leberman and Palmer, 2008).

In my own classes, I have seen that young women think the world of work post-university is free of discrimination and if feminism is mentioned most react strongly against it, seeing the term as derogatory and not applicable to them. Eagly and Carli (p. 199) confirm this, stating that “feminism does not have the cultural relevance it once had”, which means individual women often have to find their own way through the labyrinth without the collective support of feminist activism, which brought about many of the changes I have benefited from. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring the issues surrounding women and leadership – it is very comprehensive and thought-provoking. For a quick summary of the key points made in the book, see Eagly and Carli (2007) “Women and the Labyrinth of leadership”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 85 No. 9, pp. 1-11.

Sarah LebermanDepartment of Management, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand