WOMEN CLIMBLING THE CAREER LADDER

Patricia Layzell Ward, Library Link Convenor-in-Chief, UK

Write anything on the subject of women and management and you are into an area of controversy. The glass ceiling, affirmative action, and equal opportunity - all are themes that have appeared in the general management literature and that of a profession that attracts a high proportion of women. At the present time I am writing a section for a library management textbook and it has been read by a number of women managers of library services on both sides of the Atlantic, and there is no clear agreement as to whether they support the views put forward.

So it was with great interest that a story was read on the subject of women and management which appeared in the UK's Sunday Times for 3rd January 1999. It is the leading story on page one and is based a study carried out by Peter York for a firm of head-hunters. A sample of Britain's most successful women chief executives and top professionals was interviewed who now aged 45-60 (said to be born in the pre-feminist era). They are described as being middle-class and highly educated, usually with supportive husbands (some of whom gave up their careers to be a house husband).

One outcome of the study is the view put forward that pushy women don't make it to the top. The advice that those interviewed offered is that younger women need to loosen up: they are considered to be too intense and "suffer by comparison with male contemporaries who concentrate on the job in hand rather than on their careers". The group interviewed are portrayed as being cheerful, self-confident, a motherly lot who passed through the glass ceiling "without ever realising that it was there". They generally had not planned their careers, and did not expect to have it all in terms of having a family or marrying high-flying men. The successful women executives expressed concern that the younger generation, although better educated, better qualified, more focused and dedicated, are anxious and intense because they are working in a competitive environment.

Looking back at the time when the older women in the group started their careers, a higher percentage in the UK might not have been graduates and so have gained their skills, initially, in the workplace supported by part-time study. This would be the same for most professions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Women had an advantage in not having to undertake National Service, and so gained two years' work experience compared with many male colleagues. But having this advantage, they might still have encountered a degree of prejudice until the Equal Employment legislation became fully effective in the UK in the 1970s. The UK has not enacted affirmative action programmes that emerged in the US.

Now the questions that I find are interesting:

• do the findings of the study reported above reflect the situation in the field of information and library work?
  
• Do women have to be pushy to get to the top of the information and library profession by breaking through a glass ceiling?
  
• Is it now more stressful to get to the top at the turn of the century?
  
• Is there any variation around the globe?

Your comments would be most welcome.

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