Why Are Women Still So Underrepresented in Management?

We’re less than 90 days away from the end of 2022, and though there have been astronomical changes in the way business is done, women continue to lag behind men in getting leadership positions. The pandemic is partly to blame. However, there are other factors – some as old as time – and others that are supposed to help women into management, but don’t.

“Prior to the pandemic really, things were looking up, we were getting more women in the workforce,” says Nicole Coomber, assistant dean of the full-time MBA program and clinical professor at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business. She has interviewed over 50 working mothers about their experiences during the pandemic, as part of a study she’s co-authoring. What Coomber found is that pre-Covid, women’s employment was at record levels, but it dropped significantly in September of 2020. That’s when a lot of schools across the country announced they would not be returning to in-person learning that school year.

“It’s hard for me to kind of separate out women’s issues and mother’s issues because 86 percent of women in the U.S. between the ages of 40 and 44 have children at home,” says Coomber, who adds this is also the age range for women when their careers are reaching leadership potential. During the pandemic’s peak most daycare centers were shuttered. “So Covid to me proved that lack of childcare and lack of supportive structures are really what keeps a lot of women from leadership roles.”

Web technology blog ReadWrite cites last year’s Women in the Workplace Study, which finds the most significant barrier women face in business isn’t the glass ceiling. It’s the floor - the barrier to entry-level management positions. In regard to that Coomber says, “I think sometimes what we hear is that, oh women don’t ask for leadership roles or women need to skill-up and learn their negotiation skills or engage in some impression management. What the research has shown us time and time again, is that women who ask and women who engage in self-promotion behaviors actually get penalized. We (society) don’t like women who speak up for themselves.” She says, “we like women who speak up for others. What women need is sponsors and advocates in the workplace to speak up for them for a role.”

Female representation on boards and in executive suites remains woefully low, according to a gender diversity report cited by CNBC. Women who have roles on corporate boards often do not hold the most powerful positions on them. “There’s a tokenism aspect,” says Coomber, “we have one woman in the C-Suite, we have one woman on the board, and women aren’t stupid, we know we only see one and we want to be that one.” She says, “if being that one means we don’t extend a hand to lift up the woman behind us, then that’s what we do, because women are just as self-interested as men.”

“If a company can start to make sure that they are broadening out who’s on the board, who’s in leadership so it doesn’t feel like it’s a zero-sum game, that’s a really important step they can take,” according to Coomber. Several studies have shown that there’s more diversity in businesses that have a woman as CEO or chair of the board.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Training is common on the job now and is often seen as a method to pave the way for women and minorities to get into management. “There’s a really great study by Harvard Business Review about what actually works to get more women and other underrepresented groups into leadership and it’s not mandatory diversity training,” says Coomber. “Mandatory diversity training actually has a backlash effect, it doesn’t make people more open to creating structures within organizations. What does work is explicit mentorship and sponsorship programs and working with college groups to identify the high talent, high performers, high achievers early on.”

Looks like women may have a way to go before fully breaking the glass ceiling, but they continue to create cracks in it. Learning and talking about what works and doesn’t work to advance women in the workplace appears to be key to the effort to bring that ceiling down, once and for all.