Women’s careers: What helps? What hinders?
10Eighty is delighted to sponsor Gill Amos's research into what helps and what hinders women's careers. It has long since been known that women suffer a pay gap when compared to men doing similar jobs. This research focuses on the why and more importantly what can be done about it.
Gill's white paper reveals two factors. Extrinsic factors determine whether you are able to exploit opportunities as they present themselves, these are: you need informal career support, the support of your manager, luck, and you need to have developed your personal brand. Intrinsic factors such as drive, resilience, adaptability, confidence and the ability to take career risks are also essential to career success. The research goes on to identity blockers. Again using the extrinsic and intrinsic factors model: extrinsic factors are children, a poor manager and male behaviour that looks after blokes; intrinsic factors such as self confidence and self esteem.
More importantly, the research identifies what both individuals and organisations can do to eradicate these blockers. The individual needs to know themself. 10Eighty's CareerCENTRE helps to identify what motivates the individual and what it is that they enjoy doing and are consequently good at. These three are essential to successful career planning. You need to build a network. 10Eighty believe that investing in helping people in your network is vital to them helping you. You need drive and resilience. Being prepared to negotiate around your career goals is also important.
Organisations can facilitate career development for women by establishing role models, sharing success stories, putting in support networks and the mandating of unconscious bias training of all managers. The provision of career management support tools will significantly help to deliver more role models, share success stories and give women line of sight of opportunities across the organisation.
Michael Moran, CEO of 10Eighty believes "Too many organisations fail to tap into the potential of their people. People development all too often is left to chance. It is okay to say career management is the responsibility of the employee, but you have to put in place the infrastructure in which people can plan their careers. You have got to facilitate and enable employees. Organisations that leave career development to chance will lose their best people, fail to engage their employees and subsequently underachieve as businesses".