Women in management: Limited progress! Limited prospects! Chapter 10 Women in management: Limited progress! Limited prospects!

Women in management Despite early progress following equal opportunity legislation, female managers remain concentrated in lower management levels in Australia. 2008 Australian Census of Women in Leadership shows women held 2% of CEO positions and 8.3% of Directorships (down from 2006 figures). Women’s poor representation in management is consistent across metropolitan and regional Australia.

Industry segregation The labour force remains gender segregated Industry sectors where women hold the largest share of management positions: Health care and social assistance; Education and training Accommodation and food services Women are poorly represented in industries where average earnings higher (construction, mining, electricity, gas, water and waste services)

Barriers to women’s access to management Over time, many factors have been identified to explain women’s limited access to management: Individual Social Organisational The focus of this chapter is on the responses by organisations to increasing women’s representation in management.

Organisational approaches (I) Equity structures and strategies – formalised HRM structures developed in response to EEO legislation. Identify conscious structures: those explicitly and formally including demographic group identity in HR decisions; Identity blind structures: those that do not explicitly include demographic identity in HR decisions. Konrad and Linnehan (1995) found Identity conscious structures were linked to increasing the employment status of women, while no change was associated with Identity blind structures.

Organisational approaches (II) Despite this, in the past decade, we have seen a shift from Identity conscious to Identity blind structures French and Strachan (2007; 2009) analysed equity policies in the finance and transport industries. They found: 50-60% did not address equity as an issue; Relatively few organisations in either sector implemented proactive strategies to increase recruitment, promotion or development of women.

Importance of specific legislation The strength of specific and clear legislation such as that prohibiting sexual harassment is seen in the strong response in this category with 65% of finance and 75% of transport organisations reporting policies categorised as consistent with legislative requirements (French and Strachan, 2007; 2009);

Temporal flexibility The most common ‘equity’ policy reported by organisations has been temporal flexibility – allowing both women and men to remove themselves from the workplace for family reasons (but this has been most commonly taken up by women). Concurrently, time devoted to work remains a common proxy for measuring an individual’s potential for senior management. It seems, then, that the ‘equity’ policy of temporal flexibility is not assisting women’s movement into senior management positions.

EEO: white elephant rather than gift horse While we acknowledge the importance of the legislative framework, the limited progress of women into senior management positions suggests it is time to revisit the legislation. Other means may need to be considered if substantive change in women’s representation in management is to occur.

Revising the legislation: Changes to the EEO legislation should include: Requiring greater strategic reporting of outcomes, eg the setting of gender targets and reporting of progress in annual reports; Toughening the sanctions for non-compliance; Extending the sanctions to outcomes-based measures; Extending the reach to organisations with less than 100 employees. If these changes were to happen we may see the white elephant becoming useful.