Women as Managers in the World’s Top Corporations: Underestimated Potential

Abstract

Although the concept of gender equality does exist in all developed countries, the number of female managers is still very low. Hitherto, there have been many studies conducted in the field of feminine style of management which perfectly illustrate both their advantages and disadvantages. Nonetheless, having all this knowledge does not improve the situation of women in getting to the management positions. There is still this unwritten rule that women are perfect for administrative jobs and less responsible ones since they are expected to focus more on their families. In that case, the owners of corporations do know that a company can run with an employee being on a maternity leave, however this does not work for managerial positions. The situation when a manager is a man is widely known and has been present since such a position was intro-duced, so sometimes for particular corporations it is very difficult to ‘break the ice’ and apply a scenario (which was not present/tested before) when the woman is a manager. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyse the world’s largest corporations in terms of the number of female managers. It is important to realise that women are underesti-mated for managerial positions so their share in the total number of managers in the World’s top corporations is very low.