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this regard, the past 15 or so years have seen great gains in women’s representation in leadership roles. For example, recent data from the United States indicates that women represent just over 50% of those in management, professional and related occupations (US Department of Labor 2005). Similarly, in Britain, the number of women executives has doubled in this period (Equal Opportunities Commission 2002) while, in the past five years, the number of female FTSE 100 directors has almost doubled (Singh and Vinnicombe 2005). Now that women are increasingly occupying leadership roles, this introduces a new question of interest: what happens beyond the glass ceiling?

Research suggests that, once women manage to break through the glass ceiling, they continue to encounter a range of problems and barriers. For example, Stroh et al (1996) found that more women left management positions than men (26% and 14%, respectively), not because women had more family commitments, as is often argued, but because women encountered sub-optimal career opportunities and thus became disaffected with their jobs. Possible sources of this disillusionment have been identified by Lyness and Thompson (1997), who found that women’s satisfaction with their positions was significantly lower than that of men. In part, this was because the positions they occupy tend to (a) be more restrictive, (b) involve less authority, and (c) offer fewer tangible rewards.

Such subtle differences were also demonstrated by Frankforter (1996), who found that the positions held by women in senior management more often involve dealing with other staff (for example, HR management) rather than with an organisation’s ‘core’ business (for example, production). Furthermore, such ‘soft’ personnel work (and the emotional labour associated with it) tends not only to be less valued by organisations than ‘hard’ production work (Powell 1980), but also to involve more interpersonal conflict and greater stress (for example, Erickson and Ritter 2001), and to be less likely to lead on to more senior appointments.
Taken together, these studies suggest that women’s experiences of senior positions may be very different from that of their male counterparts. Indeed, as suggested by Ohlott et al (1994), men are more likely than women to report that the challenges they face serve a positive self-developmental purpose, while women are more likely to describe the barriers they face as obstacles.

Women on the board
Women’s increased representation in management has focused the spotlight on the abilities of women leaders, especially those at the upper echelons of organisations. Researchers, the media and employers alike are asking: how successful are female managers? Do women lead differently from men? What happens to companies that appoint women to senior positions?
In 2003, an article appeared in the business section of The Times, that sought to answer these very questions

Women in the boardroom www.51lunwen.org

(Judge 2003). Called ‘Women on Board: Help or Hindrance?’, the article examined the impact of having women on the boards of UK FTSE 100 companies. Here, Judge argued:
‘So much for smashing the glass ceiling and using their unique skills to enhance the performance of Britain’s biggest companies. The triumphant march of women into the country’s boardrooms has instead wreaked havoc on companies’ performance and share prices’ (Judge 20本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。