The myths of women progressing to the top

Honeydew is a predominately female company and we are all naturally very career driven. So an article by the CIPD outlining research undertaken by the 30% club, intrigued us. The 30% club have debunked the myths of women progressing to the top, career wise and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Shortly after International Women’s Week, women now have yet another boost to the relatively new public persona that we are good at what we do (no matter what that is!) and we want progression just as much as men.

The 30% club have identified 10 common myths surrounding the path of progress for women and debunked them using interviews conducted by business psychology consultancy, YSC and professional services firm, KPMG. They utilised a large cross-section of FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 companies, accounting for over 680,000 employees and compiled a report entitled Cracking the Code, of which the results were announced at a launch party on March 18^th 2014.

It has also been in the news of late that women are too often labelled ‘bossy’ as opposed to ‘straight talking’ or ‘a good delegator’, which are perceived to be what the male counterpart would be labelled instead. The backlash that arose was a call for a ban of the word bossy. It is thought that it projects too much negativity towards women in power and research has shown that girls are more averse to taking on a leadership role by the time they reach high school due to the negative impact that a label like this can have.

This has been backed by recent research by the CMI (Chartered Management Institute) into what type of person the UK population usually see as a role model. Surprisingly, the answer was aging, non-British males.

Unfortunately, the ‘Ban Bossy’ campaign was hit negatively by the media who said banning the word bossy would do very little to better the underlying situation – which has strangely both deemed the Ban the Bossy campaign as a waste of time, yet bought positive attention to the gender orientated insults that many women and children hear every day.