Leading while female: Analyzing women CEOs’ post‐appointment trajectory

The modern workplace is a pivotal arena for shaping societal gender inequalities. This chapter reviews theory and research on gender inequality in workplace organizations. We first provide a quick historical overview of the role of gender in the modern division of labor and present data on intersectional patterns of gender inequality in labor force participation, as well as horizontal and vertical occupational sex segregation. We then discuss prevailing theoretical explanations for these inequalities, moving from individual-level theories to structural and organizational explanations. This is followed by a review of empirical evidence on gender inequality at work, beginning with studies exploring the cultural, relational and structural mechanisms for reproducing gender inequality in organizations and moving to discussing research on mechanisms for reducing inequality. We argue that more theory and research ought to be focused on the remediation of inequality and discuss two directions: the first is an institutional theory of remediation, examining the ways in which institutional environments and actors can weaken gendered organization; and the second is a political theory focusing on the means and conditions for women to act as agents of organizational change. We conclude with suggestions for future research and theory development.

This longitudinal evaluation of gender inequalities and economic growth addresses key questions in the evolving debate over the character of gender differentiation and the goals of womens empowerment. These questions include: 1) whether the impact of strategies of economic growth served to enhance or undermine the status of women; 2) whether changes in the status of women were accompanied by significant changes in gender inequality; and 3) the implications for existing debates. Section I reviews several sets of literature pertinent to the questions using three general approaches: modernization-neoclassical women in development and gender and development. Section II presents the data and methods used in the evaluation. The research assessed the contending interpretations reviewed in the first section by combining another set of cross-sectional and longitudinal data on womens status and inequalities between men and women with other existing indicators. Section III discusses the results in the following order: 1) cross-sectional patterns in womens status; 2) trends in womens status; 3) cross-sectional patterns in inequality between men and women; 4) trends in inequality between men and women; and 5) conclusion. Finally section IV presents an overall discussion of the findings of the whole longitudinal evaluation.

Inequalities between women and men continue in global labor markets. Although the inclusion of women as labor force increases day by day, their representation in senior management levels remains insufficient. Women continue to face several barriers preventing them from attaining equal access, participation, and progress in the business environment. Within this chapter, the authors discuss two types of career barriers called “glass ceiling” and “glass cliff,” which women encounter frequently in their work life. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a general perspective on barriers of women's career advancement and to examine glass ceiling and glass cliff the in its background, its causes, and its consequences. The chapter also aims to analyze studies which criticize the concept of glass ceiling. The results of the chapter are expected to be a source for researchers in the areas of women's career barriers, women's leadership, and gender inequality.

Prior research on gender inequality in organizations has mainly studied the role of established organizations in generating different career outcomes for men and women. Recent studies, however, have examined gender inequality in the context of new ventures by looking at antecedents of female entrepreneurship and determinants of gender differences in new venture success. Yet entrepreneurship is rarely a solo endeavor, and with whom female entrepreneurs found new ventures can be critical to their success. Thus, this paper presents the composition of founding teams as a source of gender disparity. I examine how a market-oriented institutional change that lowers entry barriers to entrepreneurship unintentionally increases team-level homogeneity and contributes to gender disparity in founding team quality. As a quasi-experiment, I utilize a deregulation on the minimum required founding team size in the Korean legal industry. I argue that demographic homogeneity in founding teams increases after the deregulation because of the sequence of homophily in co-founder recruitment – entrepreneurs’ preference to first recruit more similar others and then reach out to less similar others. I further suggest that, due to the strong field-level correlation between gender and human capital attributes in the legal profession, founding team quality is particularly undermined for female founders, partly explaining why gender inequality persists despite the recent influx of women into the profession. To support these claims, I analyze 586 law firms founded by 2,572 lawyers in Korea between 2005 and 2014.

PurposeThis paper aims to identify and systematically summarize the relevant research on metaphors that are used to explain gender inequalities in the organizational context.Design/methodology/approachThe researchers conducted a systematic literature review using bibliometric techniques and content analysis.FindingsThe systematic literature review identified a total of 1,269 papers in 688 journals written by 2,441 authors. The first paper was published in 1971 and the publication growth can be observed in the five decades analyzed. The Gender in Management: An International Journal, was the journal that published more papers about this thematic. Michelle Ryan was the most influential researcher regarding the number of papers and citations she had. The content analysis performed with the 27 most influential papers showed 4 research streams (metaphors; gender and leadership; challenges, stereotypes and toxic environment; and gender in the academy). Concerning the metaphors explored in those papers, the glass ceiling is the most prominent. Furthermore, 26 kinds of barriers were identified regarding the challenges that women face to reach positions of power.Practical implicationsThe scrutiny of the metaphors and barriers enable access to what is being a hindrance to female progression in the organizational structure. So, this study may instrumentalize organizations and women to improve gender diversity practices in the workplace.Originality/valueThe value of the paper lays in the extensive literature review, using a bibliometric approach and content analysis.

Certainly, the challenges of motherhood cannot be encapsulated in a single study, given their breadth and complexity. The focus of this research is the reconciliation of work and motherhood. This research aims to understand how the female civil servants of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Minas Gerais (MPMG) in Uberlândia seek to balance work and motherhood. By exposing the issues surrounding this challenge in the public service, new metaphors emerge that enhance the analysis of the phenomenon in a sector where, supposedly due to job stability, difficulties might be milder. Studies on gender inequality have resulted in analytical metaphors such as the glass ceiling, crystal labyrinth, glass cliff, queen bee phenomenon, maternal wall, second shift, labyrinth, and tokenism, to name a few, highlighting the significance of this research topic as an object of analysis. The research is qualitative in nature, employing semi-structured interviews with public servants from the MPMG, with the corpus interpreted following the approach of Braun and Clarke (2006) for the use of Thematic Analysis, a technique widely applied in social and human sciences research. Throughout the 20th century, increasing transformations, along with higher education and shifts in cultural norms, contributed to the integration of an ever-growing number of women into the workforce. Feminist movements have played a prominent role in advocating for better living conditions for women; however, socially ascribed roles still prevail, with women bearing the responsibility for family care and domestic work. Women remain overburdened, facing double or triple work shifts while also dealing with the consequences of balancing multiple demands, which adversely affects their health. This research aligns with Goal 5 of the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda, which contains targets related to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. It aims to provide a social and practical contribution by rethinking existing societal models, so that the combination of these responsibilities is less traumatic for both mothers and their children; as well as to foster discussion on the topic to move towards building new social practices, starting with the deconstruction of traditional roles assigned to women. It is understood that the results and reflections stemming from this research can offer broad benefits to society, as childcare is essential for their development and should therefore not be solely the responsibility of women, but a collective concern. Additionally, this contributes to practice through the Technical-Scientific Product arising from this dissertation: a bibliographic product in the form of a technical/technological article that will be submitted for publication after the dissertation is approved.

Purpose This paper aims to determine possible differences in causes or characteristics between men and women in attaining the CEO position in large publicly listed companies in the USA. Design/methodology/approach T-test statistic, correlation analyses and logit model were used to determine the role individual factors (tenure in management roles, age of CEOs, number of children, years of education) and the firm-level factor (number of employees, net income) play in determining the likelihood of having a female CEO. Findings The research results show that years of education, the number of children and the number of employees in the business play significant roles in determining the likelihood of having a female CEO. An increase in the number of children and years spent in education lower the probability of the CEO being a woman, while having greater number of employees raises the likelihood of having a woman CEO. Research limitations/implications The findings are applicable to only the largest publicly traded firms in the USA and are not applicable to mid to small publicly listed, private or non-for-profit companies or institutions. This research is a starting point for future research of women and men CEOs of small and mid-size publicly traded and non-publicly traded firms in the USA. Originality/value Prior research has shown that having children is detrimental for women in management positions; this research specifically identifies this problem for the CEO position. It also reveals that having more of education does not translate to getting to the CEO position for women.

Egalitarian countries cultivate high-performing girls

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Videoconferencing, and Gender

The low participation by women authors in research is an important equity issue in Computer Science Research (CSR). There are various parameters and methodologies that can be used to measure the gender imbalance. In this paper, we present a study on gender gap, imbalance and women participation in CSR. We conduct our experiments on DBLP bibliographical database and analyze several years of publication dataset across various domains of CSR. We perform Exploratory Data Analysis on the bibliographical dataset and study the trend of gender imbalance over several years. We propose eight research questions across various facets and our results shows a significant gender imbalance in different sub-fields within CSR and low rate of women participation across various regions of world.

Sex and gender gaps in medicine and the androcentric history of medical research

This chapter introduces the book and its contribution to examining gender inequality, more commonly referred to as the gender gap, by offering diverse perspectives and analysis of women’s lived experiences from a broad range of settings and contexts. This collection complements existing literature analyzing gender inequalities, by honoring feminist epistemology that recognizes knowledge as situated knowledge and the centrality of women’s lived experience. This book adopts a methodology referred as ‘critical friend’—where every topic covered includes a critical response from another researcher. This collection makes an important contribution to our collective understanding of gender inequalities. This book adds topics not usually discussed when referring to the gender gap, as well as covering more common topics like inequalities in terms of employment, payment, and political representation and participation. All chapters are based on qualitative research and have in common an approach the embraces interdisciplinary, intersectional, and intentional research. This volume gives recognition to non-tangible dimensions of the gender gap, which are as important as those dimensions captured by the gender gap indicators.

According to the last report “Women FTSE 2009” developed by Cranfield School of Management and the IE Business School and sponsored by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, Sainsbury, Enlivens, HSBC and Pearson, the number of European companies with women in positions of executive direction has been reduced from 16 to 15 and the number of women in the board meetings from 39 to 37 has fallen. Moreover, there has been a decrease in the number of total of businesses with women in their counsels, since 1 of each 4 businesses has an exclusively male counsel. The study, reveals a pessimistic panorama for women from the analysis of the number of guidelines that work in the companies that belong to FTSE 100, the British index that includes the 100 main values of the London stock market. The study also reflects a descent in the number of women that occupy key positions in the businesses of the FTSE 100. In the year 2008 there were only 5 women CEOs and 3 regional executive directors. In the 2009 only there were 4 CEOs. The purpose of this article is to see if the origin of this situation is a direct consequence of businesswomen confronting more difficulties than the businessmen upon putting in common its professional and personal life or if by contrast this corresponds to an stereotyped perception of gender inequality. With this end we conducted a study using a sample of businesswomen and men with experience analyzing its motivations to create business, difficulties that they find, and the solutions to improve the conciliation of its professional and personal lives. The results show that there are no significant gender differences in the motivations, regardless of who the head of the family is (bearing main responsibility for the house and children). On the other hand, we show that businesswomen diverge from businessmen in the perception of motivations and challenges they have. Indeed, businessmen agree with businesswomen in the motivations and difficulties that these have, and consider that they give to them more importance than women themselves.

This paper proposes to measure and to evaluate gender gaps and gender inequalities by means of the decomposition of an inequality measure. A three-terms decomposition of the Gini index is applied, thus allowing to take into account also the role of overlapping between female and male subpopulations. We develop an unified framework for the evaluation of gender gap, linking traditional measures, based on subgroups income means, to the approach related to inequality decomposition, and showing how overlapping component represents a key issue in gender gap analysis. An analysis of the income distribution of the Italian households shows how gender gaps represent a major source of inequality, without particular improvements during the last 20 years.

In reality, many well-known companies hire female executives in crisis. Surprisingly, a considerable number of companies have turned around successfully. This phenomenon is thought-provoking. Managerial cognition constructs the underlying logic of the internal mechanism of organizational capabilities, strategic choice, and organizational performance, which plays a decisive role in the organizational turnaround. Therefore, based on a managerial cognition perspective, we raise a fascinating question: do female executives have unique characteristics in managerial cognition and play a decisive role in an organizational turnaround? With the sample of A-share non-financial companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen Exchanges from 1999 to 2012, this study constructs an interpretation framework of female executives, professional competence and political connections for the organizational turnaround. The results show that: （1） Female executives have a significantly positive impact on the organizational turnaround in crisis. There is a significantly positive relationship between the proportion of women and the organizational turnaround. Furthermore, after excluding the influence of industry and organizational life cycle, the above conclusion is still valid. （2） Professional competence and political connections of female executives reinforce the positive effect between female executives and the organizational turnaround. This study enriches the relevant research on the managerial cognition of female executives, verifies the “Lehman Sisters Hypothesis”, and has important implications for stabilizing organizational operation.The contributions are as follows: First, it provides evidence for the legitimacy of female executive positions. Many companies still lack correct cognition and enough attention to the position legitimacy of “occupational minorities”, and there are also explicit or implicit “glass ceiling” and “glass cliff”. Under this background, this study argues that female executives are not “scapegoats” or “vases” in crisis enterprises. On the contrary, based on a managerial cognition perspective, they are more likely to be leaders who play cognitive advantages and help crisis enterprises to turn around. This study suggests that organizations should re-examine the legality of female executive positions. Second, it provides a new perspective on the turnaround strategy of crisis enterprises. Previous studies have emphasized the impact of environment, resource capability, retrenchment, and strategic actions to promote the turnaround based on the Industrial Organization Theory, Transaction Cost Theory, Resource-based View and so on. However, few studies have illustrated the importance of managerial cognition. Therefore, based on the characteristics of female executives, it is of great value to explore the impact of the human spiritual model and cognitive framework on the strategic effectiveness of crisis enterprises. Third, it expands the research on the causal factors of organizational turnaround. Based on the Upper Echelons Theory, the turnaround outcomes of crisis enterprises are significantly influenced by the top management team compensation, executive turnover, CEO status and so on. This study further introduces the new progress of the research on the TMT Heterogeneity, and it includes the proportion of female executives, professional competence and political connections into research, which enriches the research on the driving factors of organizational turnaround.