Women in the Workplace

The Financial Times has been running a lot of articles recently about the case of women in the business world. The gender divide issue always provides interesting issues for exploration. Although sometimes I do get fed up with the amount of analysis it receives and yet reality doesn’t always keep up with this. There’s so much talk about equality between the sexes, how the workplace benefits from the contributions of both men and women, and how we can cater to their respective needs. But then we’re confronted with the facts that men still occupy most top management positions and women do get paid less. I can never get over how it’s still so unbalanced.

And it’s particularly interesting for the area of arts management which employs so many women. In college as well, students of the arts are mainly women. In our MA class there are only two men out of 27 students. Does the gender imbalance apply in the arts sector too? Be interesting to know.

Anyway, on this subject of women in the workplace, the FT ran an article entitled “A final push can break the glass ceiling” back on Nov 17^th. It was relating the findings of recent research which posited that the reason for a lack of women in top management positions was because they lacked backing from co-workers and bosses to propel them up the ladder. This was mainly due to both men and women not encouraging these kinds of supporting relationships for fear of accusations of sexual misconduct.  

Aside from this rather sad state of affairs however, I was also struck yet again by how the role of the manager affects colleagues and staff, in particular how successful management can benefit the career prospects of others, or indeed harm them. I hadn’t really thought about the importance of having someone believe in your work and value your contribution. It seems obvious, but I just hadn’t considered the real effects it can have on why certain people end up in certain positions. And from the employee perspective, if you have a manager who doesn’t champion you, then if you want to progress up the ladder you’d probably have to make sure you could champion yourself.

Just something to be aware of.