Women and Leadership

Perhaps we can begin to answer this question by examining how leadership styles are affected by gender, and how women are increasingly perceived as being capable of leadership. Advancement to the upper echelons of management becomes possible only as perceptions of leadership style are adapted to include women. This research paper will present a brief history of women in the workforce and discuss the extent to which their numbers have grown, explaining briefly what that has meant for women, and for the economy. Next, the paper will define leadership styles generally and apply a leadership styles model to the changing roles of women in the workplace. Finally, it will explore how technology may be enhancing the changing face of women and work and suggest how this factor may be introducing profound changes in the concepts of leadership, and the potential for women as leaders in the 21st century.

Even before the rapid expansion of women in the workforce after World War II, the presence of women accounted for almost a quarter of all people in the labor force in the United States (Brownlee & Brownlee, 1976). Hence, women have traditionally made a contribution to the economic development o

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are perceived in the work place and the limits seemingly placed on their ability to advance to top managerial jobs. And even if they make it to the ôtop,ö one source says, they receive less money for the work they do there. ôIn fact, women may make it to upper level management but rarely to the top level, which is still an almost all-male club. Among the Fortune 500 companies, there are only 2 female CEOs; among the next 500, there are only five. Wall StreetÆs ÆFinancial WorldÆsÆ list of the top 100 earners includes no women (Glass Ceiling, 2000). With this in mind, we shall now turn to the question of leadership styles. Could it be that women are not advanced to the top positions, and are not paid as highly for the positions they do manage to attain because they do not have the ôclassic ô male leadership styles? Women in executive, managerial and administrative jobs earn only 69.2 cents earned by their counterparts, which is significantly lower than the 75 cents for women generally (Glass Ceiling, 2000). Why are they paid less? What is it that a ôleaderö is expected to be, do, and look like, anyway? Classic leadership styles have changed with the advent of modern business practices. One model of leadership styles identi
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Approximate Word count = 1691
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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