International Women's Day 2021: Women in top management are still clearly in the minority. Corinna Gerl, a master's student in the Business Administration program at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, has conducted research on this topic and will present the results of her bachelor's thesis on "Women in Top Management. Causes for Underrepresentation and Support Measures" at the International Women's Day Conference in Economics, Finance and Management.
The aim of the conference, organized by Katowice University of Economics in Poland, was to bring together scholars in an international online conference to jointly celebrate International Women's Day. Scholars from universities in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe presented their research findings related to the conference focus 'Promoting Pluralism in Business, Finance and Management'.
The proportion of women in middle management and in academic professions has increased steadily over the past years, yet women are still clearly in the minority in top management, i.e. in management and supervisory boards. This circumstance is questionable, among other things, because a large number of studies show that companies with gender diversity in top management have a higher corporate performance, provided that appropriate framework conditions, such as a conducive design of personnel policy instruments, are created.
As part of her research, Corinna Gerl investigated the causes for the under-representation of women in top management as well as measures to promote women in order to counteract this under-representation. The methodological basis was a systematic literature analysis of studies and articles from business management journals ranked in VHB-Jourqual 3 (2015), the journal ranking of the German Association of University Teachers.
Corinna Gerl identified societal, individual, and organizational reasons for the low female presence. Societal reasons emerged as the dominant cause, in particular still prevailing prejudices and role models. The existing obstacles require a need for action in the direction of the advancement of women, which results in political as well as in manifold company measures, which the author also pointed out in her presentation.
The supervisor of the bachelor thesis and co-author of the conference contribution, Katja Wiedemann from the subject area HRM & Leadership, is also pleased with the success achieved.