GRAM Family Drop-In Studio, by Steven Depolo, under a CC-BY-2.0 licence
I spent the first 10 years of my career in one of the very best, but also perhaps least diverse, organisations around.
The British Army taught me a huge amount about leadership, but those lessons did not include how to handle the conversation with a woman coming back from maternity, or […]
Photo by unsplash.com, under a CC0 licence
Diversity and gender equality programmes are now a well-established feature of leading employers’ human resources strategies. Supporting women to remain in the workplace and achieve senior leadership positions is regarded increasingly as not just ‘right’ but also profitable – there is a business case for creating and maintaining a diverse workforce.
However, the focus in […]
Photo by startupstockphotos.com, under a CCO licence
In the workplace and society, being male has innate advantages, even though this ‘male privilege’ can be difficult to see and recognise. This privilege is rooted in organisational talent management systems, which may be biased in ways that disadvantage women and promote people who mirror the current senior leadership team.
It can be hard for […]
Pregnant, by Frank de Kleine, under a CC-BY-2.0 licence
Laura Bates rose to prominence in 2012 when she founded the Everyday Sexism Project, a website that collects women’s daily experiences of gender inequality. Since then she has published two books (Everyday Sexism, 2014; and Girl Up, 2016) and given a number of talks about the barriers to gender equality in everyday life, […]
Fontana di Trevi, Rome, by Giorgio Galeotti, under a CC-BY-2.o licence
Women are underrepresented among top leadership positions everywhere. Gender quotas have been proposed to accelerate the process towards economic gender equality and to promote women’s empowerment. Norway pioneered the introduction of gender quotas for boards of directors in 2005, followed by Italy in 2011 and, more recently, by France and […]
Athens street scene, by Luigi Guarino, under a CC-BY-2.0 licence
The “added worker effect” hypothesis suggests that the wives of unemployed husbands increase their job-finding efforts in order to maintain the family’s standard of living (Gruber and Cullen, 2000; Stephens, 2002). We investigate this hypothesis in the Greek labour market, which is characterized by increased job separation rates (layoffs, contract termination, […]
(No name) by Pixapopz, under a CC0 licence
Although the college gender gap has reversed, females are still under-represented in high-powered and high-paid careers as CEOs, Ph.D.s, and more generally in finance, business, science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) fields.
In a recent paper (Joensen and Nielsen, 2016), we assess three potential explanations for this inequality. First, are the labour market […]
A woman in a business meeting, by CDC/Dawn Arlotta acquired from Public Health Image Library, Public Domain licence
In the last decade, a number of countries adopted legislative actions to promote gender balanced representation on corporate boards. Norway was the first country to do so in 2003. Following the Norwegian example, some EU countries (Spain in 2007; Belgium, France, Italy […]
Biotechnology Research, by Idaho National Laboratory, under a CC-BY-2.0 licence
“I am a little more open, polished, quick-witted, talkative, a little … more arrogant, pushy… Moreover, I am a woman. That means, I have simply a lot more ambition, and I am substantially more communicative.”
This is Irene. She is a biochemist at a prestigious university for Science, Engineering and Technology. In […]
So here is what Jeremy Corbyn should have said: “Workplace cultures in which out-of-hours networking is key to professional success and career advancement indirectly discriminate against women because these networking practices exclude workers with caring responsibilities and the majority of those workers are still female.” I’m glad he didn’t say that. It would have got absolutely zero attention in […]
As my train rolls through the stunning Swiss landscape, I find myself distracted by three young women talking animatedly about coding, where they might do their PhDs and whether they might prefer to work in academia, banking or high tech. They’re on their way to a Nanobiotech conference while I’m on my way to an event on how men […]
Customer service outrage. The phrase instantly conjures up stories of customers being ripped off, mistreated and rudely dismissed by sales staff. Yet we rarely stop to consider a different side to the story and examine the experiences of the thousands of workers in retail and hospitality, who deal with offensive, intimidating and humiliating treatment from customers on a daily […]
Nineteenth century norms of respectability are alive and well for women elite leaders in the UK. Women leaders’ bodies and appearance are markers for their performance evaluations – both as credible leaders and as respectable women. This barrier, facing women at work, is not often talked about in organisations.
Respectable Business Femininity
Women in leadership face unique challenges relative to men. They […]
Look around at your desk. Do you have a picture of your partner, your children, or your pet? Does it tell your colleagues a little about you and your life outside work or is it a neutral, blank canvas?
While there is much talk about ‘bringing your whole self to work’, what does it really mean? For many, it’s not […]
When women started entering the workforce after the Second World War in greater numbers than ever before, it was assumed that, in time, the best and brightest would naturally rise to the top. However, 70 years on, women are still not represented in the upper echelons of the business world—holding just 22.7 per cent of board seats of the […]
Mounting evidence suggests that women leaders impact their organisations in positive ways. From innovation and profitability to consumer outreach and social responsibility, firms that promote women to top positions reap significant benefits. We also know a great deal about the factors that limit women’s advancement. But what about women who overcome the odds and ascend above the glass ceiling? […]
The creative industries promise career opportunities for all: If you are creative, innovative, a good communicator, an ideas person and keen to join in a networked community of knowledge workers, you can make it here, allegedly. Because creativity, innovation and ideas know no race, class or gender, traditional social inequalities are not a problem.
Over the last few decades this […]
More than one in ten complaints of sexual harassment at work are reported by men. In a recent study, I found that the majority of cases (78.4 per cent) were female complaints against males. However, women were accused of sexually harassing men in 5 per cent of cases and men accused other men in 11 per cent of cases.
The […]
It is now well accepted that gender is a major source of differentiation in the labour market. On average women earn less than men, even when they have similar education, and work full-time and in identical occupations. Until recently, little information was available on how sexual orientation factored into people’s work experiences. The availability of new data has allowed […]
It’s no secret that men rule the boardrooms of the world—holding 88% of board seats worldwide and 92% of CEO positions.
Yet, research shows that gender diversity in business leadership is known to bring fresh thinking, more creativity and better decision making, as well as increased competitiveness and financial performance. To succeed, companies must have the best pool of talent […]
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