Are Women Leaders Overlooked for CEO Positions?

An article titled Women Leaders, Overlooked for Chief Executive Positions, written by Cedric Moore Jr., discusses the effect of the glass ceiling in the workplace. Moore also mentions the many different leadership approaches we have discussed in class and how these work together in association with women leaders. It is still evident today that women have a very small stake in the upper management position of companies, and a question posed is do women have the appropriate leadership styles that many companies look for to run their organization? Even though women have proved they are capable of leading organizations and the glass ceiling is slowly breaking down, how long will it be before the leadership gap is more proportional? As Moore mentions about the human services field, "women are more likely to occupy direct care and middle management positions rather than top management positions even though there are more women than men employed in this field."

As we have seen in chapter 13 of Northouse, women tend to lead in a more democratic way than men do and that women also tend to be "devalued when they lead in a more masculine manner, occupy a typically masculine leadership role, and if their evaluators are men" (303). Moore also mentions this as a reason that women are found less in top management positions, saying that women have lower self-efficacy about the positions than men, citing different research studies that show that women who led with masculine traits  received poor evaluations as leaders. This results in women choosing a more democratic model of leadership because it will lead to better evaluations. So how much does self-efficacy play a part in a woman's ability to lead in a CEO position? Are women less confident in their performance that in turn is resulting in more coworkers not identifying them as leaders, or is prejudice still a reason? Moore states in the article that "the correlation between high self-efficacy and masculine traits appears to be a blue print for success as a leader."

 Overall, women and men only have slight differences in leadership style, noting that women have an advantage in a more feminine leadership style and do better with transformational leadership. Still, the leadership gap of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies is immense, where women hold only 3% of the positions. Research shows that family related obligations are one reason to the lack of women CEOs as well as having less work experience and they are more likely to work part time. It is also found in research that "as the number of women at the top increases, so does financial success" for the company (306). The glass ceiling is starting to break, and as more women strive to overcome the prejudice and stereotypes against them and their leadership style, there will be a higher likelihood that the leadership gap will close.

Article link:  Women Leaders, Overlooked For Chief Executive Positions

works cited:
Northouse, Peter Guy. "Women and Leadership." Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2010. 303, 306. Print.

Posted by: Rebekah Pinson