Women in Management Review: Article Information
Women in Management Review: Article Information
Women in Management Review: Article Information
to women in management roles?", Women in Management Review, Vol. 20 Issue: 2, pp.107-116, https://
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Women in
What is wrong with current management
approaches to management roles
development in relation to women
107
in management roles?
Received April 2004
Sharon Bartram Revised November 2004
Department of Management Studies, University of York, York, UK
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Abstract
Purpose To challenge gender neutrality within management theories and to show how such
theories influence the practice of management development to the detriment of women managers.
Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a feminist questioning of changes in
management theory over the past several decades and the impact this has on management
development practice in relation to women.
Findings The notion of a feminine ethos being carried to practicing managers through
characteristics culturally associated with females should be helpful to women. However, the basis for
formal, mixed group situations as a means of enabling women to develop as managers is debatable. A
continuing reliance on questionnaires that fail to quantify the extent to which the constructs reflect a
gender sensitivity and the failure to recognise such situations as reflecting relations between women
and men in the wider social context serve to reinforce women in a subordinate role to men, deferring to
and privileging mens knowledge.
Originality/value The value lies in how the paper shows the barriers facing women as they
develop as managers in contexts that are still masculine despite claims of a feminisation of
management. It is also valuable in the way it suggests a different way of working with women on their
development as managers.
Keywords Gender, Women, Managers, Management development, Feminism
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
Women participating in organisations in management roles are no longer unusual. I
think back nearly 30 years to the start of my career when I could have counted on one
hand the number of women managers out of at least 75 managers based in the head
office where I worked. A comparison of statistical evidence from the 1980s and 1990s,
both in the UK and USA, shows that women are increasingly finding their way into
managerial roles (Rothwell, 1985; Wajcman, 1998) and emergent with this has been a
range of literature about women as managers. Bell and Nkomo (1992, pp. 236-7)
summarise the sorts of questions being asked about women in management over the
past 20 years: Can women be managers? . . . Do male and female managers differ in
their behaviours and actions in organisations? . . . Why arent women managers getting
to the top?. These questions demonstrate the shift in subject positions available to Women in Management Review
Vol. 20 No. 2, 2005
pp. 107-116
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Academy of Management 2004 0964-9425
Conference. DOI 10.1108/09649420510584445
WIMR women made possible through this questioning. In other words, to ask whether women
20,2 can be managers opens the possibility for women to become managers; to ask whether
male and female managers differ in their behaviour means that women are managers
and makes it possible for women to be different; and to ask why women managers are
not getting to the top means that women are established in management and it is
possible to see women in senior positions within organisations. I want to ask a different
108 question: what is wrong with current approaches to management development in
relation to women in management roles? What I mean by management development in
this instance are the off-job workshops and programmes offered by training providers
and in-company human resource development practitioners that represent the formal
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What has been said about managers and managing over the past few
decades?
Say management and as word association, the reply would very likely be
Mintzberg or Drucker as examples of influential writers about management. It is
not surprising that these writers are men, as an analysis of the prevailing management
discourses of the 1970s suggests that management is a masculine thing. A good
example to explain this point is the writing of Mintzberg (1975, p. 49) when he
challenged the traditional view of what managers do, based on the work of Fayol, as he
talked about the folklore and facts of the managers job: If you ask a manager what he
does, he will most likely tell you that he plans, organises, coordinates and controls
(italics added). The subject position made possible here excludes women from the
picture completely. Men are managers and managers are men: the two constructs
conflate to mean the same thing. This is further established as Mintzberg articulates
his intention to broaden the readers view away from the traditional view of what
managers do: my intention in this article is simple: to break the reader away from
Fayols words and introduce him to a more supportable . . . .description of management
work (Mintzberg, 1975, p. 50, italics added). The discourse of Mintzbergs writing not
only shows that managers are men but it also shows that women were not expected to Women in
be readers of literature to do with managing. The intended audience for his work were management
men in managerial roles. It is as though women managers could not exist, they were
not addressed in this work, they were invisible and excluded from the research process roles
that made possible the knowledge claims made about the job of a manager as
Mintzberg (1975) based his findings on research with men occupying a range of
management roles from foremen to chief executives. Women did not figure at any level 109
of management according to this research.
And yet women were in management roles in the seventies, myself included, but
understanding the gender bias of management theorists like Mintzberg can help to
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explain the struggle I felt between being a woman and being a manager. If managers
are men how did I get the job? Did being appointed a manager mean I was behaving
more like a man? This seems to be a perennial dilemma for women: that of whether to
learn to fit in to the dominant paradigm of management or to play another game, do
management differently (Bryans and Mavin, 2003, p. 112). Back in the seventies I did
not feel as though there was an option, to be a manager meant to act like a man,
whether consciously aware of this or not. And for men in management roles the subject
positions made possible through the management discourse of the time were ones of
power, authority and control. The manager was the one who set objectives, who
organised and allocated work, who motivated and communicated, who measured
performance and developed people (Drucker, 1979). Mintzberg and Drucker went as far
as to state that no job is more vital to our society than that of the manager
(Mintzberg, 1975 p.61) and that management maybe the most important innovation of
this century (Drucker, 1979, p. 11). This discourse has the manager as hero and
saviour almost, not solely within organisations but within the wider society. This
privileges those whose job it is to think over those whose job it is to do the
mind/body split of Descartes (Blom, 1977) and so downgrades the position of the
worker, the producer: these people cannot be productive without a manager having
made decisions first about what needs to be done, how it needs to be done and when.
This discourse also privileges the public sphere over the private and the supremacy of
capital over labour (Marx, 1962, p. 379) and so maintains the patriarchal dominance of
society.
changing nature of workers work towards self-management (Fondas, 1997) and the
globalisation of business (Scarborough and Burrell, 1996) have been catalysts to
change the discourse about women as managers. The historically specific discourses
about management that emerged in the seventies could no longer be maintained and
whilst in the 1980s some writers continued with the myths that there is reality to
management, a truth about managing and being a manager (Stewart, 1986) and that
anything to do with managers and management is gender neutral (Stewart, 1986), more
critical voices could be heard in the light of the changing social context that began to
examine, for example, sex role stereotyping and the impact on women in management.
Womens dual role in families and the economy highlights cultural contradictions that
lead to womens work being seen as secondary (Rothwell, 1985). If society perceives
womens role as housewife and privileges this over work roles then the subject position
made available to women is that of housewife who also has a job (Rothwell, 1985, p.
85) and being placed in the home first, the private sphere, leads to the unquestioned
assumption that the behaviours needed to be a manager are not congruent with the
perceived sex role behaviours designated to women. Men, on the other hand are free of
any such dual role, which makes it easier for them to be associated with positions of
power. This is the double bind for women again: where managers are described as
being less submissive, more independent, less excitable in minor crises all male sex
role characteristics then a woman without these attributes is likely to be rejected as a
manager, but if a woman has these she might also be rejected as not adjusted to her sex
role (Rothwell, 1985). The problematising of womens dual role is a timely addition to
the literature on management as from the 1990s different voices were starting to be
heard.
Roseners (1990) work on the ways women lead offers a new subject position for
women: as managers who have their own way of doing things. In asking women
managers about their leadership style Roseners work is ground breaking in that it
starts from womens perspectives and enables women to express their views on
leadership, and in this challenge dominant, masculinised command and control styles
of leadership and replace this with a transformational style associated with women and
traits that can be gendered as feminine. This moves the debate about women in
management on from the premise that women can be equal to men to the premise that
women are different to men. My concern with this is that one homogenous,
universalising perspective is replaced with another and one that is in danger of
reinforcing gender stereotyping. By labelling as feminine traits such as being
excitable, gentle, emotional, submissive, sentimental, understanding, compassionate,
sensitive, dependent (Rosener, 1990, p. 121) puts women back into subject positions
that suggest a weakness in relation to men, when traits such as dominant, aggressive, Women in
tough, assertive, autocratic, analytical, competitive, independent (Rosener, 1990, management
p. 121) are labelled as masculine.
Whilst I think Roseners work is flawed it does open up possibilities of talking about roles
women in management in different ways and is part of a growing, critical literature
about what management is and how men and women do this (Stanford et al., 1995;
Bass et al., 1996; Vinkenburg et al., 2000). This literature adds to an ongoing debate 111
about sameness/difference between men and women as managers and begins to
challenge the predisposition that management is about being rational, detached and in
control (Collinson and Hearn 2000), replacing this with notions of the feminisation of
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I think, overall, these help women because womens perspectives are starting to be
heard and the gender neutrality of theories is being called in to question. For example,
not all management literature reflects a feminisation of management; a review of
teamwork literature highlights the continued characterising of teamwork through
masculine discourses that serve to limit or inhibit the theorizing of feminine identities
(Metcalfe and Linstead, 2003, p. 95), in other words how womens voices continue to be
ignored, but we have reached a historically specific moment when this can be
challenged and shown to be what it is. By revealing the gender blindness within
theorising the opportunity to change this becomes possible.
And yet, there is something insidious about the feminisation of management; it
seems that just as womens place in management is gaining legitimacy the importance
of management is being downgraded. The notion of feminisation helps to explain why
I sometimes have a difficult time with groups in my role as a Management
Development practitioner, I am feminisation personified. Does this mean that the still
predominantly male groups I work with think they are getting a lesser deal because it
is a woman helping them to develop their management skills? I remember one client
telling me he did not want any fluffy training around his factory in other words no
women or womens ways of working which is how feminisation can be devalued.
In the light of all of this the second strand to my argument with current approaches
to management development is two-fold: firstly, if management development practices
reflect the changing discourses within management then the sorts of training courses
and workshops that I am referring to are sites where womens voices are still silenced.
If these interventions are trying to help managers develop in ways that reflect theories
of feminisation then there is a collusion to enable men to appropriate and so make
legitimate attributes that do not hold the same legitimacy when associated with
women. Secondly I am not convinced that current approaches are keeping up-to-date
with contemporary management theories. From my own experience I am always
surprised by the continued popularity of stalwarts such as learning style inventory,
based on Kolbs (1984) learning cycle and Belbins team roles survey that owes a lot to
the legacy of Mintzbergs (1975) ten manager roles: figurehead, leader, liaison, monitor,
disseminator, spokesman, entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator,
negotiator. Whilst critics of Kolb have highlighted the questionable extent to which the
constructs used reflect a gender sensitivity (Severiens et al., 1998) and the apparent
lack of acknowledgment that mens ways of knowing and communicating have been
privileged (Hardy and Hodgson, 1991) there still seems to be an unquestioning
acceptance of the content of these sorts of surveys that are bound up in cognitive
theory (Bryans and Mavin, 2003). A problem with these sorts of products, both as a
reflection of my own practice and that observed in other management development Women in
practitioners, is that the products can be presented to groups without any context, the management
historical specificity of the theories that these commodities represent is not made clear.
The result is that such surveys become a universalised and taken for granted means of roles
measurement. When one becomes aware of the historical specificity of the products one
can see how incongruent these are, in particular examples such as the team role survey,
in relation to contemporary management discourses in the way these hark back to a 113
positivist paradigm of truth and certainty and name subject positions that serve to
maintain dominant masculinities, making it damaging to women to complete such
questionnaires as their perspectives are made invisible and kept silent.
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these events as sites of culturally associated social orders to uncover how relations of
power/knowledge seek to silence women and maintain the dominant male culture.
An alternative future?
Discourses to do with management have been changing over time. The invisibility of
women in management theories has been replaced with a lively debate both
contrasting and contesting women and mens ways of managing. Against this
backdrop of a changing socially specific context the use of formal off-job management
development courses and workshops remains a taken for granted, unproblematic
process for managers, both men and women to learn relevant skills. In this paper I have
set out to problematise these sort of interventions and have developed three strands to
my argument that this sort of development:
(1) Reinforces and maintains a masculine way of doing things, placing women in
the subject position of other.
(2) Both colludes in the appropriation of feminine attributes by men that brings a
legitimacy to these that is not possible when they are associated with women
and yet continues to rely on learning materials that are incongruent with
contemporary theories thus maintaining a silence over women ways of
working.
(3) Sets up relations of power/knowledge that are damaging to women in that they
are relegated to a subordinate role through reinforcement of social relations
between men and women.
Invariably my analysis throughout this paper has led me to see how the subject
positions available for women are limited to those that others in power make possible
and with the growing number of women entering managerial jobs the time is right to
challenge this and undo the way that females are constructed as subordinate,
automatically leading to the devaluing of what women do (Gherardi, 1994) and one step
is to think about developing women as managers from a different starting point.
Throughout this paper I have become more and more convinced that the sorts of
workshops I run as a management development practitioner and see other
practitioners run are no longer relevant or helpful to women, indeed these types of
social gatherings are dangerous places for women and so finding alternative
approaches is important to me on a personal level.
Inquiry into whether researching alongside women as a development practice is a
useful way of working with women on their development as managers and
constructing a feminist poststructuralist research methodology, which means working
with women in ways that value and privilege their perspectives and experiences, is the Women in
topic of my doctoral research. Through this inquiry I want to offer other practitioners management
and myself new ways of working with women managers. This approach opens up the
possibility for women to relate to and make sense of their management roles and how roles
they manage in ways that do not involve fitting in with a dominant view about the way
to do things that seeks to draw a veil over the legitimacy of their experiences. I see this
as a liberating approach in that women are free to create their own subject positions, to 115
name themselves rather than be named.
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