Handbook of Gendered Careers in Management

Globally women make up 52 per cent of the workforce, yet they continue to experience occupational segregation and women are still found predominantly in management positions. From the early sixties on there has been a growing number of female managers linked with women’s rising education level. As a result of growing coeducational schooling opportunity and women’s desire to occupy responsible positions, careers nowadays are more mixed than before. The introduction of more formalized HRM models has also allowed women to climb up the hierarchical ladder. This does not mean for as much that men’s and women’s careers are becoming thoroughly undifferentiated. Indeed, despite their fair school performance and growing presence in higher education, manager women still do not manage to get professional path similar to men’s. Educational background is not enough, several other factors come into play such as the force of stereotypes and of so-called “male” organizational standards, indirect and systemic discriminations inherent to HRM structures and policies, gender-based roles and the malefemale distribution of family and parental tasks.

Handbook of Gendered Careers in Management is a compendium of the current research, practice and future directions in the field of gendered careers in management. This monograph is intended to students, practitioners as well as policy makers for attaining considerate into current practice and theory including gendered employment in management. The Handbook maps the many strands of work potentially relevant to exploring gender and management. It covers aspects of the field such as its diversity, emerging development, potential marginality and increasing clarity of definition, and considers implications for researchers. The purpose of the Handbook is to examine the concept of sex roles, gender and their influence on the studies of working life, with special focus on supervisory and leadership studies of working life. The theoretical and practical insights presented are transferable across all management career sectors and offer an original perspective into gendered employment within business and management. However, in the studies of working life the work women do has for a long time remained rather invisible and gender has only been a variable among others. Before inspecting the emergence of gender in the studies of working life, it is, however, necessary to specify the concepts used and some of the models by which women’s employment and the segmentation of the labor market have been explained.