The Working Week 71

Why don't women occupy more senior leadership positions? That's the subject of this week's Working Week discussion as Wayne is joined by Harvard University psychologist and Management-Issues columnist, Dr Myra White.

While increasing numbers of women have moved into the middle ranks of management over recent years, this hasn't translated into more women at the very top of organisations.

According to Myra, the problem is that models of effective leadership are still based on men and the types of talents that they bring to such positions. Women are just not seen as credible leaders. Indeed, both men and women view women as being less confident and thus suitable for leadership roles.

To make maters worse, making it to the top remains very much a political process – one in which women usually loose out.

Even worse for women is the fact that if they instead act more passively in an attempt to be more palatable, they are then considered to not be competent enough for leadership positions.

Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and Sarah Palin's nomination have both illustrated the strong negative reactions that women evoke when they dare to aspire to leadership positions typically held by men. Both have been subjected to a type of harsh criticism that one rarely sees leveled at men. Moreover, this criticism frequently spills over into personal realms that have nothing to do with their capacity to lead.

So given these deep-seated cultural attitudes, how do we get more women into leadership positions? Myra argues that what we really need to do is to rethink how we select leaders. Rather than looking at "who" they are, we need to examine how they behave and what they actually do. In other words, we need to re-asses our ideas about what leadership actually is. Which given the type of aggressive male leadership 'enjoyed' by the financial giants whose collapse has precipitated the current economic crisis, is probably no bad thing.

Myra White teaches managing workplace performance and organizational behavior at Harvard University and is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of Follow the Yellow Brick Road: A Harvard Psychologist's Guide to Becoming a Superstar, a book based on her research into how over 60 well-known people became superstars.

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