DIVERSITY, INCLUSION & EQUALITY

You Broke the Glass Ceiling. Now It’s Time to Tear Down the Walls!

October 23th, 2021 | Diversity, Inclusion & Equality

With an increasing focus on gender ratios in leadership roles, we have become aware of how few women hold managerial roles in many industries. One of the industries that are traditionally dominated by men is the Automotive industry. This article looks into whether an automotive company broke the glass ceiling and – if so – did they also tear down the walls?

Some time ago, we diagnosed a client in the Automotive Industry, and we were not surprised to see that the percentage of women in the workforce decreases steadily as we move up the hierarchical levels. Yet, with an average of 15% women in managerial roles, the client was doing almost twice as well as the rest of the companies in the Automotive industry.

According to the Global Gender Balance Scorecard for the Automotive industry, published by a leading gender diversity consultancy, women only accounted for 8% of the executives* in the top 20 automotive companies in the Fortune Global 500 and that over half of those companies did not have a single woman on their executive teams.

The client seemed to be on the right track towards a more balanced gender ratio considering these numbers.

When we started diagnosing the real organization and its collaborative relationships, we however revealed a problem behind the numbers of the gender headcounts. Collaboration patterns showed that female top-level managers did not collaborate at all with their male peers, and only moderately with each other.

The numbers behind this were shocking:

• 0% of the women on top-level management collaborated with men on top-level management – whereas men on top management collaborated 40% with other men on top-level management

• 40% of the women on top-level management collaborated with low-level management – whereas men on top-level management only collaborated with low-level management in 4% of the cases

What does this tell us? Male top-managers tend to collaborate horizontally with both genders, while female top-managers tend to collaborate vertically with a bias towards other women.

“Clearly, gender diversity issues persist beyond the glass ceiling”.

Although Women Leadership Programs are becoming more and more popular, they seem to differ very little in terms of what they focus on. Top universities such as Yale, Stanford, and INSEAD all offer such programs. According to their websites, their focus is on developing personal leadership styles and skills and connecting with other female leaders. Put differently, the focus lies on integration with lower levels and integration with other women, respectively.

Of course, these programs are a step in the right direction towards increasing the number of women in managerial positions. The questions are:

• What happens next?
• Where is the effort to help female leaders integrate into a team that is already dominated by men?
• What about the effort by male leaders to help integrate their new female peers?

Our analysis of this recent client in the Automotive industry tells us that

breaking the glass ceiling is not enough, it is also crucial to tear down the walls!

*The article is based on a case study from 2018. More recent data shows that the proportion of women in the automotive industry increased to 20%.