Women's lower career advancement relative to men is sometimes explained by internal factors such as women's lower willingness to make sacrifices for their career, and sometimes by external barriers such as discrimination. In this research, we test how external workplace barriers guide individuals' internal decisions to make sacrifices for the advancement of their careers
By: Loes Meeussen, Christopher Begeny, Kim Peters, Michelle Ryan
Posted on
Overview
Women are still strongly underrepresented in leadership positions. For instance, in the European Union and the United States, less than one quarter of board members and only 5% of CEOs are female It is often suggested that this underrepresentation of women in leadership positions (and overall tendency toward less career advancement) may be due to women's own behaviour and choices – that women do not show the necessary behaviours nor make the necessary sacrifices to climb the organisational ladder.
Indeed, several statistics and findings would suggest that women make fewer sacrifices for their careers than men. For instance, men more often work full-time than women and among full-time workers, men on average do more hours of paid work per day and do more overtime than women. Moreover, men more often travel for work and miss out on time with their family because of work, whereas women more often switch to a less demanding or more flexible job and refuse overtime or more responsibility at work. Given these findings, it is important to study where these gender differences in sacrifices for one's career come from.
In this article, we probe the question of why women may be less likely than men to make sacrifices for their career, which is tethered to a key factor that is important in anyone's decision-making process: the potential that making a particular sacrifice will yield some success, that is, will “pay off” or be beneficial to the individual. We argue that men and women use similar decision-making processes – taking into account the potential success for their career when deciding whether to make such sacrifices. Yet, we expect that the external circumstances under which these decisions are made may be gendered: women's more frequent experiences of discrimination at work, and their perceptible lack of fit with those higher up the ladder, ultimately signal to women that making sacrifices for their career may not result in some success (i.e., benefit their career) and thus reduces their willingness to make such sacrifices.
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