Female Career Advancement in the Workplace: A Performance Perspective

Gender equity has been globally recognized as an issue of policy frame work due to growing strategic value of diverse human capital as a competitive edge for the organizations. The international development community is actively concerned with ‘mainstreaming’ gender issues across the policy process so as to address the significant asymmetry between the male and female professional careers, especially when it comes to attain the highest echelons of management.Men are still earning more than women for comparable work and progressing more easily up the career ladder than women do. This phenomenon of invisible barrier in the career advancement of female managers is commonly termed as ‘glass ceiling’ and is mainly considered to be composed of stereotypes about female gender in terms of agentic/communal divide generalizing women to be lacking the agency attributes considered suitable for higher managerial positions. This qualitative research study, conducted in the public sector of Pakistan, has attempted to delineate the constituents of ‘glass ceiling’ for career women from the perspective of their performance on the job. It aimed to investigate whether the prescriptive gender norms spill over into the job performance of females such that they might fall short of the expectations of their performance evaluators along with identifying the variables that are responsible for either supporting or hampering their progression towards the ultimate stage of their careers. The study intended to capture both the inside (women’s own) and outside (evaluators’) perspectives in terms of Interactive Model of Gender-Related Behavior by Deaux and Major (1987). It transpired from the thematic analysis of the primary data of this research that women perceived and enacted their professional roles in the same manner as of their male colleagues however their ability to perform is sometimes discrepant from their actual performance due to various factors associated with their gendered division of labor in terms of societal dictates. The agentic / communal division on the basis of gender, as existed in the literature, was not evident in the scores of male and female interviewees of this study where both returned a high score on communal traits and mean score of both agency and communal was higher in the case of female participants.The interaction of various factors, evidently serving to moderate the upward career progression of working females, has been conceptualized through the ‘female performance model’ grounded in the primary data of this research. A number of peculiar, context-specific organizational practices have also been revealed through the primary data of this research which have been explicated in terms of cultural frame work of Geert Hofstede (1984). A significant impact of cultural and contextual variables on various issues faced by females in pursuance of their careers as well as their responses and/or handling techniques endorses the divergence views of the postcolonial feminist theorists yet the components converging beyond the situated contexts of women present the possibility of a cohesive feminist front albeit with sensitivity to diverse perspectives of women around the world.