training were the answer to all gender discrepancies in leadership and the workplace, MBA programmes would surely offer such a solution, given that they are designed to provide the skills and knowledge to develop leaders – irrespective of gender. Why the female executive pipeline is leaking Despite a relatively high proportion of women enrolling and graduating from MBA programmes however, the pipeline of female executives is still leaking. While some business schools have achieved gender parity, the leaking pipeline in the majority of industries still presents a significant problem, with data from 2023 showing a mere nine per cent of FTSE350 companies have a female CEO, according to the Women Count Report . Academia is unfortunately no exception. The pipeline starts leaking at PhD level where 60 per cent of PhD graduates are female, but only 25 per cent of higher education institutions have a female leader. We are not lacking well-educated women; the gender ratio of graduates at PhD and MBA level illustrates this. Leadership training is clearly not shifting the status quo and it cannot do so because it is not a lack of knowledge or skills that is preventing women from progressing to the higher echelons of organisations. Instead, there are deep-seated and unconscious beliefs entrenched in the business sector. What we have found is that culture collectively replicates gender stereotypes and gendered roles in the workplace. Such stereotypes are manifested in all aspects that determine career progression: career choice, (as outlined in my article co-authored with Mustafa Ozbilgin, Strategies for combating gendered perceptions of careers , published in Career Development International ), plus recruitment and performance appraisal, as well as redundancies and job security during turbulent times. Female-focused initiatives striving for gender equality are fundamentally flawed: they are introduced at the superficial level of culture without any intervention aimed at radically
psychological functioning. He’s not the only one; the concept of achieving harmony between love and work is also prominent in the theories devoted to psychological maturity and well-being. If all human beings want to love and to work, in what way are businesses – and by extension, business schools – failing to support women in attaining this balance? We must ask ourselves how we can overcome the obstacle of under-representation of females in certain professions and in the upper echelons of many organisations, as well as how best to create a society and environment where men and women can engage in a realisation of their ambitions on equal terms. Defying the leadership stereotypes Leadership training, informed by much of the literature addressing the struggles of women in the workplace, has adopted the view that women lack certain competencies and behaviours necessary to succeed in a professional context. They aren’t assertive enough and their networks are not sufficiently robust to provide them with the career capital they need to survive. Notable works in this vein include Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In . It advocates that women emulate certain behaviours, as this will lead to their greater inclusion and grant them an equal place to men in the work arena. Women – in Sandberg’s opinion – need to take charge of their careers by aggressively and proactively pursuing success. Numerous initiatives and training programmes designed specifically for women have subsequently emerged. Targeted development offered to females is presented as the panacea for gender inequalities in the workplace. Most of these initiatives are only available to women already in leadership positions, which begs the question: surely, these are the women who are less in need of such professional development? Academia is no exception in offering senior women’s development training only to those who can demonstrate their leadership position and avenues for the exercise of power. Yet if
28 | Ambition | JULY/AUGUST 2024
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