SYSTEMS APPROACH TO WOMEN IN MANAGEMENT

According to Vecchio (1991), female managers often experience a number of gender-based career problems. The most frequently occurring problems are said to be: (1) low or unequal salaries; (2) restriction of upward mobility; (3) lack of mentoring; (4) difficulty meeting rigid work schedules due to the need to fulfill family roles; and (5) sexual harassment.

The most common means of assisting women to meet sex-based difficulties involving their work and careers has been the affirmative action program. Badgett (1995) defines such programs as responses to legal mandates proscribing that ethnic, racial, and gender utilization in a given organization be representative of the general labor market.

For example, if a given group is found to be under-utilized, an organization would, under affirmative action provisions, establish goals and timetables for the selection, promotion, and training of members of the under-utilized groups. Further, the employer would compile evidence that the company has made a "good-faith effort," to achieve the goals laid out in the affirmative action program.

However, recent Supreme Court Decisions have struck down affirmative action programs on the grounds that, as currently developed, they are themselves discriminatory in that they tend to have been designed to select certain individuals solely on the basis of race or gender with very few oth

ed as a permanent and ongoing organizational process, information-gathering should also be a continuous activity. Information may be quantitative (e.g., data referring to workforce composition) or qualitative (eg the opinions of the workforce). Kandola, Fullerton and Ahmed's (1995) characterization of the Systems Approach to diversity is directly related to the proposed research in that the research constitutes an attempt to better understand diversity/gender-based problems through a comprehensive evaluation of the relatedness of these problems to a variety of background and career experience variables of female managers. This evaluation should provide a fuller understanding of this element of organizational functioning and thus provide a foundation for the development of solutions to remediate and or eradicate the problems. Section Summary: The first section of the review explicated the Systems Approach to organizations and to the maintenance of diversity including gender diversity at all organizational levels. The discussion of the approach addressed several points. First, it was pointed out that the Systems Approach characterizes an organization as a complex interaction of human behavior. Second, the roots of the appro