These tips are intended for anyone in a professional position who would like to understand and improve aspects of professional life that can be particular to the experience of women. Like all the Leadership Collection’s Quick Tips, they address a topic that has a large and detailed literature devoted to it; the tips are intended to give readers new to the subject an overview and to remind more experienced readers of key points.

The Differences are Real

Men dominate leadership at senior and executive levels in many professional contexts. Even though that trend has been shifting, disparities remain between the number of men and women who have worked their way into senior leadership roles. Globally, women hold approximately a quarter of senior leadership positions. Women hold one third of university president positions. However, women tend to hold fewer board seats and fewer executive roles and are not among the top earners, despite the fact that they make up nearly half of all professional employees.¹ The difference in outcomes is due, in part, to the challenges unique to women in the workplace. This Quick Tips describes underlying reasons why women face gender-specific challenges and approaches for overcoming them.

Challenges for Women in Senior Leadership Roles

Listed here are especially common challenges that affect women’s experiences of achieving senior level leadership. This list is not exhaustive; it highlights issues that can be particularly difEicult for women navigating the path to senior leadership positions.

Challenges to normative expectations

Norms are informal beliefs that guide expectations and behavior. There are leadership norms that come from popularly accepted models and examples. Leaders are typically perceived of as assertive, strong, powerful, and authoritative. There are also gender norms concerning the difference for expectations of behavior by men and women. Women are widely, across cultures, expected to be caring, communal, thoughtful, and passive compared to men, who are normally expected to be more assertive and dominant. When they act in ways that are assertive, strong, powerful, and authoritative, this is often perceived and valued differently – even negatively. Thus the stereotypical norms for men and leaders align, and the norms for women and leaders can be at odds. When men are in leadership positions, expectations for assertive and strong behavior align. Women can face a challenge; if they are caring and thoughtful, they fit the female gender norm, but challenge the leader norm. If women are assertive and strong, they fit the leader norm, but can challenge the gender expectation. This dissonance is at the heart of the glass ceiling effect,^2,3 which is the persistent difference in the rates at which women and members of underrepresented groups reach senior levels of leadership.

Challenges of work-life balance

Another challenge women face comes from the shifting nature of life in the home. Becoming a senior leader in an organization requires investment of time and dedication. Over the course of the past 40 years in the United States, there has been a significant increase in dual income households,⁴ in which both adults work primarily outside of the home. Research shows that where both adults work full time, women still do or manage the majority of the household chores.⁵ Further, women’s careers are often penalized if they step outside of work to have and/or raise children, meaning that they can be less likely than men to rise to senior level positions. For women to navigate the path to senior leadership, they face the need to overcome hurdles that remain, despite advances in gender dynamics in organizations.

Challenges of tokenism and harassment

A challenge for women in senior leadership is that sometimes there is a perception that they have been selected to fill a quota. Research has demonstrated that women in senior positions can feel as though they are taking on a “token” role, and may be less likely to identify and mentor junior women up through the ranks.⁶ If women in senior positions are given to believe that they are the only woman “needed” in a group, they can form barriers between themselves and other women who may come to seem like threats to their roles. If more junior women are viewed by the senior level women as competition, this may prevent the senior women from reaching out and mentoring these women into higher positions within the company. There are data showing that women are all too often harassed in the workplace,⁷ which can also prevent them from rising through the ranks. Often perceived as an expression of sexuality or sexual interest, it is now widely accepted that harassment is an expression of a power differential, and tends to be focused on belittling women and those of lower power. Harassment has this in common with other disruptive behaviors like bullying, or isolating people for negative attention based on their cultural background, sexual preference, religion, or other characteristics and choices.