Beyond the glass ceiling: Why businesses need women at the top

In both high- and low- income countries, women still perform the majority of domestic labour and care work at home, even when they are also employed in full-time paid work.

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Many businesses run on a culture of constant availability, where employees are expected to work overtime, take calls out of hours, and answer emails on days off as a matter of course. This makes it very difficult for women to effectively compete with male colleagues and rise through the ranks, as they continue to juggle family responsibilities with career priorities.

The glass wall refers to the phenomenon of occupational segregation where female managers tend to be concentrated in business support functions, such as HR, finance and administration. In such roles, women have limited decision-making power or strategic input, and therefore limited opportunities to rise in the company.

By contrast, male managers are over-represented in research and development, profit and loss, and operations. These areas are typically viewed as more “strategic” and usually lead to decision-making roles at higher levels.

The proportion of women tends to decline as the level of management increases, meaning that men continue to dominate chief executive positions and boards. When women are not present in the highest positions in business, they lack the influence to alter the workplace culture and so the vicious cycle of male dominance continues.

As long as women are under-represented in decision-making roles, the pipeline will continue to leak. Companies with female CEOs are more likely to have women in strategic management roles.

In the digital era, companies need to be more proactive than ever about dismantling the culture of constant availability.

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Policies such as flexi-time, teleworking, maternity and paternity leave and return-to-work programmes ensure that women are not disadvantaged at work for having responsibilities at home. In fact, these policies benefit all workers, can help reduce stress and burnout, and can lead to more sustainable productivity in the long-term.

Policies can’t fix everything, but they are an excellent place to start redressing gender imbalance.

Our research shows that companies with active equal opportunity and gender inclusive policies have more women in all levels of management. But without buy-in from managers, policies gather dust in drawers. Training for managers is crucial to ensuring that policies become workplace realities.

Women at the top attract more women at all levels of business. Our research found that enterprises with a woman CEO are over 12% more likely to have women as senior general managers, indicating a pull factor.

Enterprises with a woman as the board chair are also more likely to achieve gender balance across all management levels and departments. This pull factor is key to repairing the leaky pipeline.

Over 75% of survey respondents agreed that their company culture mirrors the attitudes and traditions of their society.

Businesses can’t single-handedly dismantle society-wide gender bias, but they can challenge it by recognizing that it exists, observing how it manifests and countering it within their workplace culture. Mentoring programmes, awareness campaigns and transparency policies are all effective tools for tackling wider gender bias.

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