women in management: progress and promise

I M a r y A n n e D e v a n n a -

Why do orgrmizations continue to have difFculty managing and equitably rewarding an increasingly diverse labor force? This article examines the perceptual difficulties that surround women3 continuing smC,gge for manageriaal and executive lights. I t concludes with suggestions for faciitating the tmnsfomtion of the workpike.

INTRODUCTION

White males now comprise less than 50 percent of the U.S. work- force, and, in the decades since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demographic profiles of most occupations have been transformed. Women and minorities have made significant inroads into previously white male-dominated occupations such as medicine, law, and business. Yet, in the executive suite where strategy is set and power is exercised, we would be hard pressed to recognize that a social and economic revolution took place. Organizations seem to be having difficulty managing and equitably rewarding this increasingly diverse labor force. Many experts offer the quick explanation that women and minori-

ties have not been in the pipeline long enough to reach the top. But, in an age when major companies like General Electric and Citibank named men in their mid-forties to their respective chairmanships and have identified and promoted to key positions the next generation of contenders - white men in their early forties - the absence of women and minorities in any numbers is puzzling and a matter for deep concern.

Why is th is so? Not for any one reason, but for a number of them. And the problem is not one that will abate as a new generation of men who came to maturity after 1964 take their turn at the helm of organizations. Change will require more sensitive measures of discrimination than now exist in organizations, as well as the ability of men to repudiate the process that brought them to power.

Human ResowceMmrrrgement, Winter 1987, Vol. 26, Number 4,Pp. 469481 0 1987 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 00904848/87/040469-13$04.00

To understand the perceptual difficulties that surround the issue, it is important to look at the economic role that has evolved for women in the United States. We must also consider the continuing conflicts women face in managing the career/family nexus as well as how women are treated during entry and advancement phases within organizations. Cultural blinders often override and make a shambles of evaluation and promotion systems and a “glass ceiling” syndrome seems to prevent women from moving into senior management positions. Why do we continue to struggle with the organizational rule that increased numbers of women in a function leads to its diminution in power? And why do statistics report more successful women sacrificing their marriages than their male counterparts?

This article examines these issues with the aim of determining what organizations can do to foster long lasting changes in how men and women relate to one another. As women’s continuing struggle for managerial rights unfolds from one generation to the next, it becomes unequivocally clear that the greatest challenge is women’s acceptance as full and equal partners in the power positions in organizations.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Women did not first enter the labor force in 1964; they have been there since the country was founded. Clearly, they played an essen- tial role in the agricultural society that dominated the initial stage of U.S. economic development. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, women and their children moved from the farm to the mills and factories that transformed this country into an industrial power. By the twentieth century, however, a change was becoming apparent. The closing of the frontier was marked by slower and more cyclical economic growth. Women’s new role was as a “filler” de- signed to close the gap between demand for labor and available male supply. A modem day analog is the role that women play in the Japanese economy, where a full employment policy and lifetime jobs refer only to the career patterns of Japanese men.

As a result of this change, American women were discouraged from working during the 1930s so that breadwinners (male heads of households) could have the available jobs. When war broke out, however, women were enlisted to staff the factories while men went off to battle. With victory, women were expected to forfeit their jobs so the returning male veterans could fill them. They complied and the baby boom began.

In the 1950s a business cycle reminiscent of the opening of the frontier began. It was to be the longest period of economic expansion in U.S. history. One could speculate that even if the Civil Rights

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Act of 1964 had not been passed, women would still have been encouraged to enter the labor force during the 1960s-to meet the demand for labor caused by rapid economic growth, the relatively low birth rate of the 193Os, and a male cohort ravaged by losses in World War 11.

This cycle of economic prosperity was unique not only because of its length but also because it was accompanied by a growing awareness that access to the American dream was not evenly dis- tributed. Groups like women and minorities did not enjoy the same privileges as their white male counterparts. In the absence of this awareness, women might well have been asked to relinquish their jobs during the next downturn. As a matter of fact, Ronald Reagan addressed these issues to the press corps in Washington, D.C. in April 1982. On the reason for the high rate of unemployment during the early years of his presidency, he said, “. . . it is not so much the recession as it is the great increase in the people going into the job market; and ladies, I’m not picking on anyone, but (it is) because of the increase in women who are working today.” This notion that all would be well with the economy if women

withdrew from the labor force is strangely at odds with the facts: Nearly half of the mothers with children less than a year old work and one family in six is headed by a single, divorced, or widowed woman. A certain nostalgia, however, lingers in the minds of deci- sion-makers about the good old days when men were men and women who had husbands or fathers to support them stayed home. In the case of Ronald Reagan, that nostalgia means a lack of interest in enforcing existing EEO legislation and a number of legal maneu- vers, albeit unsuccessful ones, to undermine existing statutes.

Legislation, however, did not nullify the differences between men’s and women’s wages. Why did these inequities continue to exist? Three major themes emerge from the extensive research into why women’s progress in the labor force lagged behind their male counterparts. They are:

1. Women invest less in job skills because they participate intermit- tently in the labor force. This is primarily due to the division of labor in the household.

2. The differential results from occupational segregation caused by the fact that women are concentrated in lower paying jobs.

3. Our socialization process causes women to be motivated differently than men. Women do not pursue success with the same energy as males.

The thrust of these arguments is that women are discouraged from entering “male” occupations and since sufficient numbers do not

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prepare themselves for high status, high paying jobs, women are underrepresented in those occupations which pay the best and which offer status and power.

After more than two decades, we have sufficient evidence to say that with the law on their side, women flocked to professional schools to prepare themselves for “male” careers. They became doctors, lawyers, and managers. And all the hard data would suggest that they have continued to work even after they marry and have families. And, preparation and hard work paid off. A study (De- vanna, 1984) conducted with MBAs a decade into their careers found no significant difference in the entry level salaries paid to women and those paid to a matched cohort of males. Similar findings were reported by Myra Strober (1 981), who focused on the Stanford class of 1976, and in a recent Forbes (March 9, 1987) article on the Wharton class of 1987.

The conclusion is that education coupled with changes in social mores have enabled women to gain equal access to career tracks previously considered to be white male preserves.

The current controversy and the area of greatest concern is what happens to women once they enter large organizations. Do they match their male counterparts in accomplishment and progress as they have in the academic programs that prepared them for these positions? If not, why not? Devanna (1 984) found that a matched cohort of men and women MBAs with continuous work histories experienced different rates of success. After a decade, the women were making 81 percent of the men’s salaries. This discrepancy emerged despite the fact that women had continuous labor force experience, worked in the same functions and industries as men, and devoted as much time to their work. The data indicate that women had not stopped moving. They were simply moving more slowly than their male counterparts. It seemed as if they had to prove their ability to handle the next assignment beyond a shadow of a doubt while men were presumed capable of handling the next assignment unless they had blundered at the current level. The basic problem with women’s slower movement is that at some point the conclusion is reached that they are not on a fast track-they are not in the critical jobs or have not had the critical experiences needed to make the cut for senior level jobs.

Thus, women suffer because they advance more slowly. And, as recent research by Drazin and Auster (1987) shows, they are not equally rewarded when they demonstrate comparable performance. This study shows that men were granted higher salary increases than women with the same performance evaluations.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CAREER AND FAMILY But what about marriage and children? Perhaps they can account

for the wage differential: “women become distracted trying to juggle

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career and family.” The data, however, do not support this argument (Devanna, 1984). Married women with children were equally likely to be in the high half of the income distribution as in the low half or, conversely, single women were just as likely not to have made it as their married counterparts.

Does this mean that no woman ever chooses family over career? Obviously not. But a recent Fortune (February 16, 1987) study indicates that they are no more likely to do so than men. The results showed that 26.5 percent of the women surveyed sought a less de- manding job to get more family time but that 20.5 percent of the men gave the same response. And more men (29.6 percent) than women (25.7 percent) said they had refused a job, promotion, or transfer because it would mean less family time. The men were also more likely to believe that companies had it within their power to help employees manage worklfamily responsibilities. The conclusion is fairly straightforward. Some men and women think that the way work is organized and careers are managed in large organizations is antagonistic to family life. More men than women had turned down a career opportunity to lessen th is conflict, but fewer men than women will suffer because someone of the same sex made this choice. A suspicion exists that women st i l l are not treated as individuals but rather as a group, while men do not carry the baggage of their less ambitious brethren.

It would seem that when women invest in the same education and skills as men, they earn equal access to “male” occupations, but not equal treatment in the internal corporate labor markets.

If the traditional explanations for the relative lack of female success do not hold up, why don’t women succeed at the same rates?

WOMEN AND WORK: THE ORGANIZATION PROCESS

A second body of literature deals with issues of women’s progress as a result of the way they are treated as they apply for entry to, and advancement within, organizations. The emphasis here is not on the role that acculturation plays in explaining male-female differences in choice of career and dedication to it, but rather on the perception of those who hire and evaluate them. Do they believe that there are male-female differences that effect performance? And, over time, do women act differently because they are treated differently? Is there embedded in organizational processes the seed for a self-fulfilling prophecy about women’s dedication to their careers?

Heilman and Guzzo ( 1978) and Heilman (1 979) conducted a series of experiments to assess the response of individuals to women appli- cants for managerial positions and their perception of what accounts for the success of men and women in managerial situations. In the first study (1 978), Heilman discusses the differential perceptions that people have as to the suitability of a physically attractive applicant

Devanna: Women in Management / 473

for a managerial job. While appearance worked to men’s advantage, attractive women whose “other credentials” were equal were perceived to be inferior choices for the same job. Thus, qualities innate to both men and women are perceived to have different value when both are candidates for the same position.

In the second study, Heilman (1979) documents the fact that women of equal qualifications were given fewer rewards for their on the job performance. In this study, the researcher’s hypothesis was: “Success due to personal characteristics will be seen as more deserving of reward than that due to the situation and that success due to stable personal characteristics will be seen as deserving of more de- sirable rewards than are due to unstable characteristics.” Test results supported the hypothesis. Thus, when either sex’s success was attributed to “luck” as opposed to “ability” they were placed at a relative disadvantage in the distribution of rewards. The underlying problem was that women’s success was significantly more likely to be attributed to “luck” than to “ability” and, as a consequence, in these experiments, they received fewer organizational rewards than the men whose success was more likely to be attributed to ability.

The Harvard Business Review sponsored a study (Rosen and Jar- dee, 1973) in which researchers analyzed the results from two ques- tionnaires mailed to 1 500 of the Review’s subscriber-managers. The responses led to three conclusions: (1) Managers expect male employees to give top priority to jobs when career and family obliga- tions conflict, and they expect women to do the reverse; (2) When a person’s conduct threatens his or her ability to do the job, managers make a greater effort to retain a male employee than a valuable female employee; and (3) In selection, promotion and career development decisions, managers are biased in favor of males except in those instances where the guidelines are unambiguous.

This line of research argues that it is not necessarily what women do that results in their slower progress in corporations, but rather it is the causal models of gender-linked behaviors that people (who hire and promote them) carry around in their heads that determine career progress. To the extent that the causal models for men and women differ, we might expect to find that outcomes for men and women will also differ even when both groups basically perform the same.

Women in these situations will not be helped by increasing their numbers unless their numbers change their evaluator’s perceptions as to the cause of their success in an organizational setting. While Kanter (1977) argued that increasing the number of women in organizations would have exactly that effect, subsequent work by Harlan and Weiss (1981) shed some doubt on the accuracy of that prediction. The researchers conducted a study of 100 female and male managers at two large retail organizations. They found that the initial cohort of women entering the organization faces stiff resist-

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ance. This resistance seems to drop as more and more women enter. However, when women get to be about 15 percent of the middle management ranks, the resistance stiffens once again. Harlan and Weiss conclude #at the numbers tend to threaten men since they make the increased competition facing men more salient.

Harlan and Weiss’s conclusions would tend to support the notion that women’s progress will not be linear and that there is a new barrier that faces them when they are 15 percent of the population. Time and experience will tell us whether this barrier will fall and what is the critical number at which resistance to women will cease to be an issue.

We can make some reasonable guesses, based on the patterns we have seen, about the conditions that will ease or exacerbate the resistance to women moving into better jobs.

THE LAW OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Access to and advancement within organizations will vary in difficulty depending upon the supply of labor relative to the demand for that labor. Thus, a society that evolved an ethic that encouraged women to remain out of the job market in the 1930s told them it was their patriotic duty to enter that market during World War I1 when other sources of labor were in scarce supply.

In the 196Os, faced with a severe shortage of managers to keep the expansion going, corporations turned to women and minorities, and invited them to join the club. The recession of the early 198Os, coupled with substantial organizational restructuring/downsizing, moved the pendulum in the other direction. Rather than look for success stories where women were managing both a career and a family, the spotlight began to shine on those who chose, at least temporarily, to “drop out.”

Shortly after the spate of dropping out articles appeared last year, curiosity got the best of a few of us, and we pulled the alumni records for the MBAs who earned degrees at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business in 1976-the same year that intrigued the press, probably because it provided a ten-year perspective. We were interested in seeing if a large number of women had defected from large organizations to stay at home or to start their own businesses. We could not detect any significant exodus. A small group of both men and women were not employed and since we did not question them we do not know if their career interruptions were voluntary or involuntary or how long they lasted. Most of this class, however, still worked for large organizations, and the percentage who started their own businesses was no greater for the women that for the men.

In a recent New York Times article focusing on a more eclectic

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group, however, women and minorities reported that they absorbed a disproportionate number of the layoffs resulting from the restructuring of US. companies. The reasons may be based in the findings of the Hurvard Business Review article previously cited, that managers are biased in favor of males, and part may result from the fact that organizations have steered women and minorities into staff positions which are more likely to be eliminated in a restructuring.

All is not gloom and doom, however. The law of supply and demand makes the future for women and minorities look somewhat rosier than the present. The baby boom generation is aging and on its heels comes a very small cohort known as the “ZPG” generation -zero population growth was the byword and this is its result. As- suming even modest economic growth, this generation will encounter a far less competitive environment simply because it has fewer members.

And buried in these numbers is an even more startling fact of life for corporations. Because of differential birth rates, the percentage of white males in this population will be at an all time low. To understand the implications of the numbers, one need only turn to the Census Bureau statistics for 1980 that show that 48 percent of all children under the age of eighteen in the state of Mississippi are black; 53 percent of all children under the age of eighteen in New Mexico are of Hispanic origin; and 32 percent of all children under the age of eighteen in New York City are classified as minorities. Organizations must learn to manage an increasingly diverse labor force, and to date, they have not domonstrated much success in doing so. The pressure for better representation at the top will come not only from women, but from minorities as well.

THE LINK BETWEEN EQUITY AND MOTIVATION

If organizations wish to attract and hold women they will have to develop more complex explanations of women’s behavior. If their experience shows that women leave in greater numbers than men do, they should ask themselves why and be prepared to be self-critical instead of putting all the blame on biology. In most organizations, the answer is really not hard to come by if one is willing to look at what goes on in the organization-and it has little to do with innate gender differences. If we asked two groups of people with the same capabilities and training to make considerable sacrifices in terms of family and personal life, to work hard and to be dedicated to their career, and told them that if they persevered in this quest the rewards in terms of money, status, and power would be great, we

476 I Human Resource Management, Winter 1987

would expect to find no difference in the percentages from each group that stuck with it. On the other hand, if the probability of success differed between the groups, we might well predict that the drop out rate would be higher for the group who faced the longer odds.

This is a fairly accurate description of what transpires in most organizations. A subset of employees perceives an environment which is reinforcing; promotions come more rapidly for them; more choice assignments come their way; they are constantly reassured by looking around them. Why, then, would we be surprised that over time the less favored group would be unwilling to make the sacrifices demanded to reach the top? The probability is lower, and like all rational people, they look at the odds and make their decisions. Thus, in most organizations women serve as a highly visible tracer group. If women do not prosper, the probability is high that the disadvantaged are not only women but men who do not “fit in” as well. In companies dominated by managers with technical back- grounds, MBAs will not fare well; in companies dominated by managers from certain schools, those from other institutions will not prosper; in companies preoccupied with “style,” even people of sub- stance can suffer; and, in companies that value their “macho” image, women have cause for alarm.

THE CULTURAL BLINDERS

Justice Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Senior executives frequently have difficulty questioning the fair- ness of the system that brought them to the top. This point was driven home to me during a conversation with the president of a high tech company who was concerned about the relative lack of progress that women and minorities had made in spite of what he perceived to be a substantial effort to increase their numbers. The recruiting effort was impressive but the record of advancement was dismal and the attrition rate was triple that of white males in the population. He started the meeting by citing the statistics and then turned to the human resource people and said, “We have not made the degree of progress we wanted in this area. How could we have made so many errors? How could we have hired so many of the wrong women and minorities?” It was suggested to him that perhaps the hiring proced- ure was not flawed, but that the process by which people were evalu- ated and promoted was inadequate. He was taken aback. He was a researcher by training and the alternative hypothesis had never crossed his mind.


Women Haven’t Been Around Long Enough

The most frequently heard response to claims that a “glass ceiling” exists that prevents women from moving into senior management positions is that women have not been in the pipeline long enough and that their day will come. But we do not have to wait twenty years to find out if a company is doing a good job of attracting, retaining, and advancing women. All we have to do is track their progress against that of equally qualified white males at every step on the organization ladder. The first time that a significant difference in the rate of advancement appears between the two groups, the organization should want to know why. And it should do everything to ensure obtaining the unvarnished truth.

I remember a conversation with the head of corporate research in a large diversified financial services organization. Senior management was concerned about the relative lack of progress of their best female hires, so they commissioned a large diagnostic study. They collected data from 3000 respondents and the inside story about why women were failing was about to be revealed: The reason why women were not getting ahead was that their behavior tended to reinforce nega- tive female stereotypes. They were more emotional under pressure and less assertive than their male counterparts. I asked from whom the data were collected. From the women’s supervisors, of course, the same men who gave them the performance ratings that prompted the study in the first place. I asked what safeguards existed to indicate that their perceptions were accurate and not the result of cultural biases. Cultural biases among our managers? Not likely, but even if they did exist, the women had done nothing to eliminate them.

If Women Do It, I t Must Not Be Important

As women move into varying functions in organizations, managers become concerned that the balance may be tipped so that it becomes, as one gentleman put it, “a female ghetto.” What, you might ask, is wrong with an organization staffed to a large extent by women? Many departments are still predominantly male. For example, senior management in most organizations is a white male reser- vation. But the organizational heuristic is that as the number of women increases in a function, the power within the function diminishes.

This rule was brought home to me in a company where the head of the human resource function was deploring the fact that the percentage of women was rising rapidly. In this company, the human resource function historically had been an influential part of the management process. The manager told me that he had worked in a

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public sector organization in human resources two decades before and that the function was not well regarded. Indeed, it was staffed almost entirely by women! And now life had come full circle. Women were filling more and more of the positions and soon no one would pay attention to anything the function said or did. Therefore, once women get to be a certain percentage of any job category, men resist hiring any additional women because their sense of self esteem will be diminished.

This phenomenon also appears in the guise of men’s reluctance to ask other men to report to a woman, especially if the woman is younger. The reasoning is that it is too bad if a man never made it, but to ask him to report to a woman would be the final blow to his dignity.

One of the major impediments to giving women managerial re- sponsibility for large numbers of people is that they will not be able to get things done through other people or that women have difficulty delegating. In most organizations, the inverse problem - which is that many men resent being delegated to by a woman-is not considered. Actions that would be classified as insubordination if they transpired between male subordinate and male manager meet with far more understanding if the manager is a woman.

Married Men and Single Women Make the Best Employees

Kane, Parson & Associates polled 197 women executives from 64 corporations in 17 cities. Sixty-three percent of these women said that in order to be successful they gave up their mamages, family plans, time with their families, and social relationships. On the other hand, The WuZZ Street Journal reported that male managers tend to marry once and stay married. In a survey of 1700 male managers, 95 percent said they are currently married and 89 percent said they have been married only once. Do organizations view mamed men as more valuable than single men, while they view single women as more valuable than married women? As dual career couples increase in number, will the most valuable recruit be a male whose wife does not work? Clearly, such a person is becoming part of an endangered species. Will organizations limit their access to bright, talented people because of a belief that this division of labor is in their best interest?

IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION

Long lasting change must eventually confront and resolve the basic way in which organizational men and women relate to one another.


This does not mean that women will not continue their progress to relatively high levels of management. They will undoubtedly make inroads, but for the foreseeable future they will be asked to pay a price for this success that is not demanded of men: They will limit the probability of marriage and children, and they will continue to lack the same clear paths and role models enjoyed by men.

Organizations can facilitate the transformation by putting women in positions of authority with men reporting to them, and by giving them the needed organizational support to succeed. They can do this by:

1. Rewarding the managers who promote women with the same frequency as men. By tying individual outcomes to equal opportunity goals, organizations send a clear message to their employees that equity is not a concept to which they give lip service but one of the measures of good managerial performance. If a manager wishes to succeed, he or she will monitor these performance measures as care- fully as they monitor revenues and costs.

2. Providing team building help to forge mixed gender groups, especially those led by women, into effective management teams. This should be easier in today’s environment, when many organizations recognize the need to find constructive ways to confront the conflict and internal competition that exists among members of most management teams.

3. Developing a greater sensitivity to the situations which cause men to resent women: Because she is the first one, because they are becoming a majority, because they increase the number of competi- tors for scarce and valued rewards. For example, it may make more sense, when possible, to move several women into an all male work group or management team. Or, vigilance can be exercised to make sure that women and minorities are among those being sponsored by senior level managers in proportion to their numbers in the population.

As behavior changes in the workplace, it could well have salutary effects on the behavior in society at large. But it would appear that such change will demand that men and women be re-socialized to believe that not only is it all right for women to pursue careers, but it is also all right for them to be equally as successful as men and for some to be more successful than all or many men in the organization.

Mary Anne Devanna is Director of Executive Education at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. In addition to her research on human resource management, she has conducted studies on M.B.A. career patterns and serves as editor-in-chief of the Columbia

480 / Human Resource Management, Winter 1987

Journal of World Business. She holds a B.A. from St. John’s Univer- sity and an M. B. A. and Ph. D. from Columbia University.

REFERENCES

Chapman, F. S. Executive guilt: Who’s taking care of the children? Fortune, February 16, 1987.

Devanna, M. A. MulelFemale careers: The first decade. Center for Research in Career Development, Columbia University Graduate School of Business, New York, 1984.

Forbes. Wharton Class of 1987, March 9, 1987. Heilman, M., and Guzzo, R. The perceived cause of work success as a mediator

of sex discrimination in organizations. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. Vol. 21, 1978.

Heilman, M. The impact of situational factors on personnel decisions concerning women: Varying the sex compositions of the appicant pool. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. Volume 24, 1979.

Kanter, R. Men and women of the corporation, New York: Basic Books, 1977. Reder, M. “Analysis of a Small Closely Observed Labor Market: Starting Salaries

for University of Chicago MBAs.” Journal of Business, April 1978, Volume 51.

Rosen, B., and Jardee, T. Sex stereotyping in the executive suite. Hurvurd Busi- ness Review, Mar.-Apr. 1973,52,45-58.

Strober, M. The MBA: Same passport to success for women and men? in P. Wallace (Ed.), Women in the workplace, Auburn House, 1981.

United States Bureau of the Census. Census Population, 1980: Detailed Charac- teristics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980.

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women in management: progress and promise

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