Factors Influencing Women Managers’ Success Term Paper (Term Paper Sample)

Factors Influencing Women Managers’ Success
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Factors Influencing Women Managers’ Success
Gender roles have evolved over centuries and are still changing day by day across all cultures. In particular, the female role in the workplace has undergone tremendous change with women taking more and more responsibility; a sharp contrast to the yester-years when women were majorly assigned superficial duties and considered less competent than their male counterparts. However, there are still considerable challenges that women face today in the workplace that impede their ability to achieve success compared to male colleagues with the same qualifications. Female managers face more challenges owing to the fact that not only do they have to contend with uncooperative subordinate staff, but also have to deal with condescending superiors or male colleagues. This paper elucidates on the main factors, positive or otherwise, affecting the success of women working as managers.
Research indicates that the single most determining factor to a female manager's success is the society around her (Lahti, 2013). Societal perception plays a significant role in defining gender roles, which in turn may serve to encourage women to pursue managerial positions or remain comfortable working in roles that have traditionally been considered and set aside for women. This is evident when statistics are taken across countries with different cultures. Countries with cultures that are more liberal towards women rights and roles have a higher percentage of successful women in managerial positions across all industries. On the other hand, countries that are more conservative and restrictive of gender roles have fewer women pursuing careers outside what is considered feminine jobs. For instance, in the United States, women hold close to 40% of management positions while in most developing countries, women hold less than 5% of managerial positions (Peus &Traut-Mattausch, 2017). As such, regardless of all other factors that might encourage women to flourish in management positions, such as education, societal perception is a critical supporting element without which women rarely flourish.
The other important factor affecting women’s success in managerial positions is organizational culture. Different organizations and businesses have unique employee practices and cultures that they promote. Although most of these cultures are defined by the type of industry in question, they vary between businesses and might serve to either encourage female employees to succeed as managers or undermine their ability to even reach managerial positions (Lahti, 2013). This results in women opting to pursue certain careers or choose to work in certain companies where they feel that their ambitions to get promoted to managerial positions are more likely to be realized.
Finally, intrapersonal factors especially those regarding self-esteem and self-efficacy significantly influence women’s chances of success as managers (Peus & Traut-Mattausch, 2017). Although women might have the same education and qualifications as their male counterpart, studies have shown ...