A global perspective to female leadership: barriers and how to promote it inside organizations.

Abstract

The thesis focuses on the female leadership issues. As a matter of fact, globally, women keep on being underrepresented in key leadership positions. The thesis is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter outlines some of the barriers women have to face, focusing on the presence of gender stereotypes and bias, the unequal distribution of unpaid care work, indeed women’s ‘double burden’ of managing work with family responsibilities and lastly, the overall lack of leadership support. These barriers, as supported by literature, hinder women’s chances of reaching top-positions. The second chapter proposes some of the initiatives companies can adopt in order to promote gender-equality and boost female representation in leadership positions, highlighting the importance for organizations to implements gender-inclusive initiatives, among which are included fair selection and hiring practices, gender-diversity trainings and women’s empowerment initiatives (i.e women’s mentoring and sponsorship) together with work-life balance initiatives in the form of flexible work-arrangements and family support systems. The last chapter, the empirical one, examines how organizations are managing and promoting gender-equality.