Key Issues in the Senior Female International Career Move: A Qualitative Study in a European Context

Research investigating the position of women in management has, largely, been confined within national boundaries. Over the last 15 years, empirical studies of women in international management have been undertaken, predominantly in North America. Overall, however, in this research field, many questions remain unanswered or have been only partially addressed. The particular focus of this study is on the senior female international managerial career move in Europe – a relatively unexplored area. Fifty senior female expatriate managers were interviewed, representing a wide range of industry and service sectors. The aims of the study were to develop an understanding of the senior female international career move in a European context in order to more fully understand both the covert and overt barriers that may limit women's international career opportunities. The results of the study show that the senior international career move has largely been developed along a linear male model of career progression, a development which, taken together with gender disparity both in organizations and family responsibilities, frequently prevents women employees from reaching senior managerial positions. The findings suggest that organizations which adopt a proactive approach to female expatriate managers should have a competitive advantage in the international environment.     

The female manager—The pressures and the problems

There are an increasing number of women entering full-time careers in occupations that were once male dominated, for example, management. Recent surveys have suggested that more women are pursuing management careers in Western Europe and the United States. The pressures on these women are enormous in view of industry's inflexibility. Corporate policies must change if women are to survive in organizations. A variety of these policies are discussed in this paper, e.g. flexible work weeks, maternal and paternal leave, change and relocation policies, career planning, etc.     

Work–Family Conflict and the Senior Female International Manager

The particular focus of this paper is on the workÐfamily conflict experienced by senior female international managers within a European context. This research is particularly relevant as existing European studies have not specifically addressed issues pertaining to the senior female international manager. For the purpose of this study 50 senior female expatriate managers were interviewed, representing a wide diversity of industry and service sectors. The study establishes that work–family conflict still prevents many female managers from progressing to senior management. The results of the study show that the senior international career move has largely been developed along a linear male model of career progression, a development which, together with gender disparity both in organizations and family responsibilities, frequently prevents women employees from reaching senior managerial positions. The study extends work primarily in the international human resource management literature, while also contributing to the research literatures on women in management and career theory.     

The challenge for women physician executives

After half a century of constituting 5 percent of the physician population, women will soon make up more than one-third of U.S. physicians. Women now practice in virtually every specialty. This enormous change has created both opportunities and tensions. Within the broader context of the changing role of women in U.S. society, women physicians are exploring new career paths--paths that are both similar to and different from those of their male colleagues. A future challenge for women physicians will be achieving significant representation in the medical management ranks.     

The relative career advancement of men and women engineers in the United States

Despite the fact that women engineering students perform as well as their male classmates during college, women engineers report lower salaries and supervisory responsibility levels after about five years in the labour force. Several hypotheses concerning the reasons for the differences in career advancement of men and women engineers were investigated in a national survey of engineers in the United States. The gender differences in career advancement could not be explained by differences in education level or in self-perceptions of ability. The fact that women were more likely to have taken a career break than were men did decrease their salaries and supervisory levels. However, gender differences were still apparent even when this factor was controlled. The careers of both men and women were affected by conflicts arising from the multiple roles of worker, spouse, and parent, but many women engineers avoided such conflicts by remaining single and childless. These results challenge several popular explanations for the differential advancement of men and women, but the actual causes remain unknown.     

Impact of networking on career development: Experience of high-flying women academics in Malaysia

The article reports a study the objective of which is to explore the experience in networking of a group of high-flying women academics (HFWAs) and its impact on career development. Data were gathered using in-depth interviews to 31 women professors who have been identified as high-flyers. Networking had brought them to fast upward career mobility. The themes that relate to the influence of networking to their career are: (i) graduate study paved the way for international networking; (ii) networking created win-win situation for both individuals and institutional partners; and (iii) personal factors contributing to networking. Findings are significant to other academics particularly women who are aspiring to be in the fast-track career.     

The relative career advancement of men and women engineers in the United States

Abstract

Despite the fact that women engineering students perform as well as their male classmates during college, women engineers report lower salaries and supervisory responsibility levels after about five years in the labour force. Several hypotheses concerning the reasons for the differences in career advancement of men and women engineers were investigated in a national survey of engineers in the United States. The gender differences in career advancement could not be explained by differences in education level or in self-perceptions of ability. The fact that women were more likely to have taken a career break than were men did decrease their salaries and supervisory levels. However, gender differences were still apparent even when this factor was controlled. The careers of both men and women were affected by conflicts arising from the multiple roles of worker, spouse, and parent, but many women engineers avoided such conflicts by remaining single and childless. These results challenge several popular explanations for the differential advancement of men and women, but the actual causes remain unknown.     

Lebenshaltungen weiblicher Führungskräfte

Women in management are faced with special challenges and conflicts in their work situation: Outdated gender stereotypes, barriers to promotion and often less pay than for their male counterparts are persisting phenomena. Using results from a random sample of 21 individual coaching series, the special conditions underlying the professional leadership role of highly qualified women is examined. The coaching objective is to look for individual concepts and strategies beyond traditional stereotypes and develop life paths that are both personally and professionally meaningful. Self-reflection constitutes a focus in Coaching; it is the key to questioning and reassessing thinking and behavioural patterns as well as to developing new behavioural options. The aim is to design career and life paths in such a way that they express the individual’s own values as well as enable women in management to increase their power to act and to command legitimate power in their professional lives.     

Breaking the glass ceiling

The glass ceiling is a form of organizational bias and discrimination that prevents qualified professionals from achieving positions of top governance and leadership. This article examines glass ceiling barriers that keep physicians from the upper reaches of management. While these factors apply mainly to women and minority physicians in academia, and are attributable to sexual harassment and discrimination, physicians as a class are frequently denied executive management positions. Such denial results from inadequate preparation for a career in health care administration. Important issues in the professional development of physician executives include mentoring, training and education, administrative experience, and cultural and personality factors. All of those must be considered when making the transition from medicine to management.     

Time for a Change? Women's Accounts of the Move from Organizational Careers to Self‐Employment

This paper is based on a study of women's transition from careers within organizations into self-employment. It focuses on three key issues: the ways in which women accounted for their career transition, their decisions to opt for self-employment, and the extent to which, in telling their stories, respondents engaged with emerging career discourses. First, this paper considers recent debates within the literature on women's exit from organizations, and emerging discourses of career and self-employment, focusing on the position of women within these changing discourses. Research findings are then presented, examining three central themes: entrepreneurial orientation, dissatisfaction with the organization and balance of personal and professional life. The concluding section considers how women made sense of the web of factors involved in their career transition and reflects on whether indeed it is 'time for a change'.     

Generation Y graduates and career transition: Perspectives by gender

The aim of this paper is to explore, by gender, UK Generation Y graduates’ views on their career transition after graduation from under-graduate business programmes. Following a literature review, the empirical work takes the form of an on-line questionnaire with business school graduates from a post-1992 Scottish University in five recent academic sessions. Gendered nuances are found in several aspects of the respondents’ views on their career transition, including statistically significant differences in: more women continuing their student job after graduation; women being more accepting of starting after graduation in a non-graduate level job; and more women than men encountering gender discrimination in the workplace. The identified nuances and differences appear to be setting the genders on diverging career tracks as early as the transition from university, in that they seem to signal more career progress, even advantage, among the men than the women.     

Planning a career path from engineering to management

In order to become successful managers, engineers must learn new skills, acquire new values and re-orient their thinking. The transition from engineering to management requires time for the individual to mature, a progression of on-the-job experiences, and careful career planning. Career planning is best viewed as part of a total human resource management system of goal-setting, performance appraisals, training, and continuous career counseling. Career planning becomes most effective where a variety of jobs and pathways are provided by the organization, when the performance requirements for these jobs are made explicit, when the criteria for promotions are spelled out, and where the salary brackets are consistent with this information. Useful career planning can be carried out without this system approach, as the case study herein demonstrates. But the systems approach makes career planning much more effective, and generally assists the engineer in making a better transition to management.     

A Study of the Promotion to Partner Process in a Professional Services Firm: How Women are Disadvantaged

Increasing numbers of women are attracted to careers in the professional services. However, when their progress is considered to partner positions, it is found that they are not advancing to the levels anticipated. When the literature in relation to the partnership promotion process is explored, we find explanatory models are rare, and rarer yet is work that considers the impact of sex bias on the process. The article adds to the limited work available by presenting findings from a behavioural process perspective through an empirical study with male and female management consultants in a professional services firm which indicates that the promotion to partner process is indeed sex biased. Two areas of disadvantage for women are identified: the presence of a self-managed career advancement process necessitating a proactive approach to demonstrating individual contribution; and the need to ‘fit’ a prevailing model of success within the firm which is a masculine model and is more problematic for women. The article calls for a differentiated treatment of the glass ceiling phenomenon, capable of capturing disadvantage accruing from societally based factors and sector-based factors. The implications of the findings for future research and professional service firms are discussed.     

Achieving leadership and success: A 28-year follow-up of college women leaders

Using a life span perspective focusing on establishing early leader identity, we examine the relationship of achievement orientations, career aspirations, personal and organizational factors, and family choices of 101 women college leaders surveyed in 1985 to ascendance into senior leadership roles and occupational success 28 years later. College-age orientations toward leadership and competition best predicted later-life outcomes. Higher college-age leadership orientation differentiated between women subsequently achieving senior leadership positions and those who did not. Networking and family support positively related to career outcomes; women with and without children had similar outcomes. Women who took leaves beyond a standard maternity absence reported similar career satisfaction to those continuously employed but were less likely to reach senior leadership positions and paid a significant economic penalty in salary. College-age achievement orientations, including leadership orientation, significantly predicted adult achievement orientations, suggesting the college years as an important period for leadership development and intervention.     

Women and technology: A review of training initiatives

This paper considers the entry of women into technological areas of work, their subsequent career progression and return to work after a career break. It considers the development of those training programmes and related initiatives which have attempted to encourage girls and young women to enter non-traditional areas of work, and others which help women return to work after a career break. It emphasizes that such training needs to address the psychological and social issues which arise, as well as provide for new technical knowledge and skills. In doing so it reviews some of the courses which are currently available and comments on their apparent success. In its concluding problems it refers to the on-going problem of funding such training and of providing a supportive database.     

How displaying empathic concern may differentially predict career derailment potential for women and men leaders in Australia

Past research notes the importance of emotions in the workplace. Much less is known about the role that empathic concern, an affect-laden construct, plays in predicting a leader's career advancement using measures of one's upward mobility, such as career derailment potential. Data provided by practicing managers in Australia show that leaders who displayed behaviors that convey empathic concern receive lower ratings of career derailment potential. We also found that gender was a statistically significant moderator of these relationships. With boss rating of derailment potential as the outcome, the negative relationship between empathic concern and derailment potential was statistically significant for women only. With peer ratings of derailment potential as the outcome, the negative relationship between empathic concern and derailment potential was stronger for women than men. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

CLASH OF CAREER AND FAMILY: FERTILITY DECISIONS AFTER JOB DISPLACEMENT

In this paper we investigate how career considerations may affect fertility decisions in the presence of a temporary employment shock. We compare the birth rates of women displaced by a plant closure with those of women unaffected by job loss after establishing the pre‐displacement comparability of these groups. Our results reveal that job displacement reduces average fertility by 5%–10%, and that these effects are largely explained by the response of women in more skilled occupations. We offer an explanation of our results based on career interruptions of women.     

中国企业知识型员工职业生涯的自我管理

知识型员工更需要而且更能够对职业生涯进行自我管理。本文在对企业知识型员工职业生涯自我管理研究回顾的基础上,通过职业探索、职业决策管理等前沿理论的分析,重点研究中国情境下企业知识型员工职业生涯自我管理的难点问题及其解决方法;从横向、纵向对企业知识型员工的职业通道进行了综合研究,提出了知识型员工职业成功的早试错、靠近性、积累性、持续性四原则;对中国企业知识型员工管理有较强的针对性。     

管理层级、职业经验与项目绩效的实证研究

基于2005年的问卷调查数据,本文对新技术商业化过程中项目管理层级差异、管理团队的职业经验差异与项目绩效之间的关系进行了实证研究.结论发现,从事新技术商业化的管理团队的经验越丰富,项目绩效就越好;但衡量管理层级的项目负责人在企业内的行政管理级别的高低对项目绩效好坏没有统计学上的差异,这与国外已有的一些实证研究结果不同.本文最后简要分析了造成这种不同的可能原因.