Female Leadership in the workforce - what do successful women in the industry have in common to reach higher management positions in a male-dominated environment.

Abstract

A lot has been done to reach gender balance at upper management levels, but the topic of femaleleadership has not lost its topicality. This leads to the assumption that the underlying problem still is not fully understood. On the other hand, it is evident that a few women successfully navigate in an upward direction within the male-dominated industry environment. Hence it is necessary to participate in the knowledge of these women and benefit from it to foster diversityand management that represents their customer base and therefore administers and manages inalignment with their customer needs.This study aims to clarify the picture of the underlying root cause that slows down the genderbalancing activities promoted by organizations and national legislation—investigating data onthe careers of successful female managers and revealing the common success strategies and the hindering factors.A quantitative approach within in-depth literature research was conducted to answer these questions.Concrete peer-reviewed papers in the scope of this thesis were undertaken by quantitative inductive content analysis to Mayring.Regarding the findings of this thesis, career-promoting factors common for successful women within the industry were Mentors, Network, Flexibility, and Support. As typical career inhibiting factors Organizational Structures, the Self, and Social Structures were identified. Further,the underlying root cause of slowing down the gender balancing activities was identified as gendered organizational structures.Further research regarding horizontal gender segregation could give further scientific insight with the potential to make further questioning of vertical gender segregation within the workforce unnecessary and even provide answers to the contradiction of gender-equal societies with evident gender-segregating structures.