Leading Women In Business:Diversity Perspective

Leading Women in Business:

Diversity Perspective

Keywords

Women at work, Glass ceiling, Gender issues, Women’s equality.

Abstract

This paper will look in depth at qualified women’s representation in the workplace according to gender diversity and business performance in the organisations. The first part of this journal is a preliminary part to entry the women’s role in business. The second part draws on overview the position of women employment within the firm and followed by some advantages of women leadership in business environment. The third section examines of the women barriers to pursue their higher career progression in the UK. Next, since the dynamic changes in business environment, gender diversity in the workplace need adjust accordingly. The paper concludes by arguing that diversity and equal opportunity can give a great contribution in organisation’s competitive advantage.

Introduction

The chosen title of this journal demonstrates the recent changes in thinking on diversity issues such as women’s equality, gender role, and women’s powers on the board of directors within the organisation. In most countries, women position on top management or even as a director in the firm is limited. On the other hand, Burke (2003) said that the benefit of female executives in an organisation could bring greater contribution to its strategies and ultimately, give a better outcome for the company’s performance. Some giant-sized companies have looked into a gender diverse workforce to leverage their cultural diversity for competitive advantage (Kochan et al., 2003)

In reality, however, women employees are still treated as a second class after men; even though the company’s official policy has been made for gender diversity. Various cases happened in some business organisations in the UK and USA highlighted that the rights of women were not as strong as men’s, especially in the board decision making.

The progression of diverse group has become a critical issue today. Many responses appeared from various fields such as corporate, academic, and Human Resource (HR) experts or practitioners (Levin and Mattis, 2006) to solve the problems simultaneously. Thus, the qualified women’s voices can be equally important to men’s in order to produce the company’s strategies, as well as their role in decision making.

Women’s role in the workplace

Since diversity issue has been recognised in the last 20 years, the organisations reacted to adjust their employment policy in order to improve the culture of organisations, and continually develop its business objectives (Kandola and Fullerton, 1998). Women’s equality is one of the diversity policies within the firm which expects that women’s position is equal to men’s and not to be seen as second class anymore in organisational lives. This kind of view is perceived as an HR term. However, it is a responsibility that has to be consistently maintained by every member of the organisation.

In this modern era, women as member of a workforce in a firm are becoming more common. Most women who live in the big city in a large number of countries are now paid as employee or even own companies that compete with other companies. This could be said that there is a great dynamic social and economic change, and the multi-dimensional nature of labour market is the reason why women workers have joined in the workplace (Kirton and Greene, 2000). Despite the fact that women employee are widespread in many organisations, only few numbers of female workers have actually succeeded to occupy their top level manager positions. As Burke (2003) argued that corporate boards of directors have not responded this issue immediately. It might be

considered that women had a low priority in most business environments in the past and even now, which is likely still embedded in board members’ minds.

Regarding the women’s role, every woman manager or director has to show her expertise in term of significant contributions toward the company since these are critical to their advancement. In order to develop women’s career in the business environment, involvement from the enterprises to promote female employees is necessary. It proved that organisation is responsible to manage gender diversity. Moreover, women leadership in both small and large business scopes gain several benefits for the firm itself. These advantages below could happen because managing diversity becomes a part of business strategies.

The first advantage is leadership skill of women can give corporations an advantage in connecting with their target market. According to Business for Social Responsibility (2007), Avon has given way to promote a woman as its CEO in 1999. Andrea Jung led an effort to sale Avon’s products and improved the company’s image into its target market who is mainly the women. As a result, Avon was gaining more profit and increasing sales. This is further supported by Mattis (2002) who proposes that the influence of women’s representation in leadership roles is even greater for companies that employ a large number of women or sell their products directly to women. It could be noted that women managers play an important role to comprehend their women customers’ needs.

The second advantage is the collaboration of women top executives in a well-established company could help the company’s image in stakeholders’ view that shows that the company truly implements its diversity policy, which could attract positive reaction in the market. Carver (2002) argues that the board represents the ownership of the organisation. Having a diverse board member the organisation can show the diverse ownership of the organisation that affect the social justice case of diversity. It would also mutually impact inside the organisation that motivate women employee to give a higher productivity and sustain the achievement of women’s role.

The third advantage to focus on women is that the difference point of view between women and men top managers in which that given arguments of board’s corporate members. Diversity provides a rich source of innovative ideas, and when diverse backgrounds can take advantage of their differences, they might