Busting The Myths That Make Organizations Avoid Hiring Women For Top Executive Positions

Much is said and written about ensuring gender equality at workplaces, especially when it comes to promoting women for top executive positions. This has seemingly led to a rise in the awareness about female rights and a change in the attitude of employers towards hiring women for posts that were traditionally considered to be a man’s forte. Sadly the ground reality is completely different, with the number of women occupying top level position even within fortune 500 companies being less than 14% of the total workforce.

According to the data obtained from top executive search firms in Canada, the number of women hired for junior and mid-level positions has surely increased. However, most of them are still denied promotion to higher executive levels. So, what leads organizations to distrust women with the responsibility associated with being a part of the top brass? The answer to this burning question can be found in the following myths that have come to be associated with hiring women for these leadership roles.

Women Come With Considerable Emotional Burden

It is a common belief that nature has crafted women to be too emotional and they carry their emotional burden around with them. This is considered to a major weakness by the management boards of most business organizations and hence the primary reason for not hiring women to positions that involve tough decision making. This is despite the fact that women have constantly proven that when it comes to taking tough decisions, they are more confident and capable than their male counterparts.

Women Have Poor Management Skills

This is perhaps the lamest excuse used by organizations to keep women away from top executive positions. There are countless women holding management qualifications from top universities and institutions waiting for an opportunity to prove their skills. In addition, women efficiently handle various management tasks in their personal lives on a day to day basis. While these might not be similar or even related to general business management tasks, they do bust the myth that women have poor management skills. In fact, given the time and the opportunity, women can prove to be better managers than men.

Women Are Incapable Of Handling Leadership Stress

There is no denying the fact that leadership roles come with not only considerable responsibilities but also great stress. Most organizations believe that women are not capable of handling such high levels of stress and hence exposing them to such situations is not right. However, this is not true as the level of stress that can be tolerated by an individual is not based on their sex. In fact, men are as likely to suffer from the damaging consequences of extreme stress as women.

Women Managers Are Not Acceptable To Male Subordinates

This is undoubtedly the most truthful reason offered by business organizations for keeping women away from top leadership positions. In fact the experts from the best executive search firm in Canada acknowledge the fact that a large number of men feel humiliated about having to report to a female superior. This often leads to creating a sense of dissent within the workforce, which the organizations try to avoid.