Women and the Leadership Role in Today’s Workplace

Abstract

A recent news article from NBC, ‘How Women Give Business in Competitive Edge’ talks about gender balance in the work place. For some companies, improving gender balance is about social responsibility, for others it’s about compliance and avoiding lawsuits, but what many businesses already know, and what many more are coming to understand, is that having women at the table is a bottom line, business imperative. When both women and men work together, a company will have a far greater breadth of thinking and decision-making. A woman CFO might be better at risk management. Women have different hard-wiring in their brains and consequential thinking, so women look at risk in a very different way, so companies that have this diversity can actually have better results. Gender balance and more women leaders of toady’s corporate culture have become more and more important in Fortune 500 companies of American. This paper is going to talk about the advantage of recently research about gender balance and more women CEOs in companies that can bring better outcome than only man leaders of a company. Though most of Fortune 500 companies realize that open more opportunities for women and train them to the top position has become a crucial role of company’s culture and future growth. It is still has gender stereotype for women leaders and glass ceiling and other barriers for women to go to the top. As the Catalyst recent report about women CEO positions at companies shows that women hold 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions and 4.6 percent of Fortune 1000 CEO positions. It has been hard for significant numbers of women to hold strong positions in leadership or in shaping and changing economy, as well as in political and social landscape. A dramatic shift has been witnessed in the 21st century in dynamics of traditional families and greater gender recognition in legislation has helped in pulling divisions of gender-role apart. As a result, women have become more independent economically and socially autonomous. However, unlike men, women are not typically associated with positions of leadership. This inequality is consistently mirrored in pay gaps, in spite of the introduction of equality in pay act. Most women are still earning between 60 – 77% what is earned by men in the United States of America. Glass ceiling effect, work and life balance, an “Ideology” that women should be responsible for child care; mentor opportunities and unintended challenges are the main problems that made women lack of representation at top executive positions. In order to deal with gender stereotype for women in corporation, more and more companies have advocate gender balance policy and more and more leading companies take gender balance as very important rule to make the corporate culture more diversity and dynamic. The argument of this paper is how important that gender balance in corporate culture and more women CEOs will bring better result of company’s outcome.