PurposeThe purpose of this study is to broaden an understanding of women's perceptions regarding advancement potential/barriers to success in upper echelon corporate roles in the S&P 500 in connection with understanding 21st-century family dynamics, rather than addressing gender in isolation.Design/methodology/approachData collection in this study is based on semi-structured phone interviews with 13 women who have been identified by organizational leadership in an S&P 500 company as having high advancement potential. The results are evaluated using interpretive phenomenological analysis.FindingsParticipants' responses support existing research showing that women feel more responsible than their male counterparts for subordinating their career prospects to those of their male partners. Further, participants express that work–life and work–family balance constitute problematic barriers to advancement and often lead them to “choose” to slow-track career advancement and to avoid advancement opportunities. This choice narrative propagates women's perceptions that barriers to advancement are self-imposed. Participants viewed the extreme work model as inevitable in upper-echelon corporate roles, signaling the need for an increased understanding of how a broad definition of familial roles and work culture – rather than gendered issues in isolation – affect advancement opportunities in a 21st-century workforce.Practical implicationsCurrent organizational diversity initiatives have focused too myopically on gender. For organizations to create a more inclusive model for success at the upper echelons, it is essential to broaden organizational initiatives to address 21st-century employees rather than gendered programs. Organizations can endeavor to implement more effective models that enable two partners in a home with dependent children to advance, and all employees, even top leaders, to balance current definitions of work–life in several ways discussed.Originality/valueThe findings of this study are significant, in that they move toward addressing a gap in knowledge concerning women's perspectives on the changing family paradigm, extreme work culture and an expanded understanding of work–life balance. This reconceptualization can help mitigate gendered research and organizational programs that reinforce entrenched binaries, and instead enable organizations to implement more effective initiatives to improve advancement opportunities.
The purpose of this study is to address a disconnect between women’s perceptions of their advancement potential / barriers to success in upper echelon corporate roles and their actual level of representation within such roles in companies in the S&P 500. This study involves the use of semi-structured phone interviews with 13 women in an organization in the S&P 500, who have been identified by organizational leadership as having high advancement potential. The results are evaluated using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to ensure an understanding of respondents’ experiences and perceptions in connection with their own process of meaning-making. In the findings, the participants’ responses indicate a disconnect between primarily positive perceptions on advancement opportunities for women, low levels of gender bias, and diversity initiatives and the actual outcomes regarding numbers of women in top leadership roles. Further, participants consistently espouse a strong sense of personal responsibility and a perception that barriers they encounter are self-imposed. This is consistent with an overall institutional narrative that organizational initiatives have mitigated the problem of women’s barriers to advancement in the corporate pipeline, which serves to reinforce the illusion of an equitable and effective meritocracy. By drawing on a phenomenological research design and prioritizing the experiences and perceptions of women on the edge of advancement into upper echelon corporate roles, it becomes evident that corporate narratives and diversity initiatives may be serving to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the status quo of gender disparity in Corporate America. Both scholars and institutional stakeholders can build on the results of this study to move toward improving the corporate pipeline for women’s advancement to executive-level roles. Keywords: gender, women’s advancement, corporate pipeline, stereotypic attribution bias
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.