Long road ahead to gender parity

The proportion of women in executive management positions in South Africa has increased marginally, according to a women in leadership census released last year. It found women occupied 3.6% of CEO positions, 5.5% of chairperson posts, 17.1% of directorships and 21.4% of executive management positions.

New breed of women

Natalie Maroun, lead strategist at performance agency LRMG, says there is a new frontier of feminism. At last some of the women who have reached the top are starting to speak out about just how hard it is for women to get there and are providing advice for younger women who are still climbing the corporate ladder. These women represent a new breed of women and are typically not the 'Queen Bee' stereotype. Queen Bees are defined as senior women in masculine organisational cultures who have fulfilled their career aspirations by disassociating themselves from their gender while simultaneously contributing to the gender stereotyping of other women.

A study of 94 women holding senior positions in The Netherlands found that indicators of the Queen Bee phenomenon, which include increased gender stereotyping and masculine self-descriptions, were found mostly among women who indicated they had started their career with low gender identification and who had subsequently experienced a high degree of gender discrimination on their way up.

Rising feminism

The Harvard article supports this with research which shows that women who succeed in jobs dominated by men often do so by distancing themselves from other women. Maroun believes this is slowly changing and we are now starting to experience a rising executive feminism which recognises individual achievement. "This is just what we need to jump-start the stalled gender revolution. Harnessing individual talent and skill, irrelevant of gender, is key to optimising business efficiencies. Any kind of stereotyping only gets in the way and slows down the natural progression," she says. "We need to overcome society's lingering discomfort with powerful women and the idea that wealth is unseemly in a woman."

Maroun says women will never reach, or thrive in positions of power as long as their wealth is shameful or their opinions belittled. Executive feminism recognises that even wealthy and powerful women run into gender bias and the resulting clog in the pipeline affects all women. "It is high time we moved away from gender and viewed people as individuals in a gender neutral workplace. The new successful leader will be one who gives all people the right to perform and the permission to be fantastic, irrespective of whether they are male or female," concludes Maroun.