Women in Leadership: Choice or Constrain?

Abstract

After 20 years of structural and policy supports in Australia, when women continue to aspire for leadership positions in both the public and private sectors, it necessitates revisiting the challenges that they still face in developing successful careers. This paper has critically examined two stands in the contemporary feminism in relation to female career development and leadership inequality in the 21st century, that is - the argument that in the changed societal context choice leads women to have differential paid and unpaid work orientations and thus, female career development up to the leadership level of roles is more of an outcome of choice or preference based on their internal psycho-social issues; and, the counter-argument that is, the structure of opportunity and the environmental variables still have significant impacts in female career development as organisations are not entirely gender equal to provide women with unrestricted choices. Then it has developed a psycho-social career development model which predicts the career development process of the 21st century modern women by identifying the primary impacting factors and their inter-relationships. As many of the traditional barriers are gone today this framework has given equal emphasis on the dynamic effects of both the psycho-social variables and the environmental constraints on female employment patterns to analyse the persisting leadership inequality in modern societies like Australia.