Are supervisors hindering women’s career advancement?

There are many very successful Chinese women. In business, there is SOHO China chief executive Zhang Xin, the real estate developer who is transforming Beijing’s skyline. Or Gong Haiyan, China’s No 1 matchmaker, whose online dating site, Jiayuan (Beautiful Destiny), has more than 100 million users. In politics, Liu Yandong was appointed one of China’s four new vice-premiers in 2013, making her one of the most powerful women in the world.

Yet these are exceptional stories. According to a recent report by The New York Times, fewer than one in 10 board members of China’s top 300 companies are women. This data is drawn from the 2013 annual reports of the 300 companies in the China Securities Index (CSI). Of these, 126 have no women on their boards at all. The CSI is a capitalisation-weighted index of the top 300 A-share stocks listed on the Shanghai or Shenzhen stock exchanges.

In this modern era, especially when gender equality and boardroom representation of women have been in focus, one would expect more female leaders to be promoted and represented at the board level.

After all, a recent McKinsey study found that advancing women’s equality can add US$12 trillion to global growth.

With International Women’s Day just round the corner, it may be timely to assess this bias in a woman’s career advancement.

In the larger business environment, there may still be an inadvertent bias against women because of the jobs and assignments they did before, despite promotions being based on merit.

Promotions are based on a supervisor’s evaluation of what we could call “promotability”.

While individuals are promoted in part because they performed well in their current jobs, they also move up after having undertaken challenging tasks.

Individuals who have had challenging job experiences tend to be viewed as more capable, more willing to make the effort, and more ambitious to reach higher-level positions.

Challenging assignments provide opportunities to learn, which are likely to result in the development of a wide range of skills, abilities, insights, knowledge and values that contribute towards effective management skills, and hence, career success.

Often, however, the underlying assumption is that individuals initiate and choose to take on such challenging job assignments. But why would that be the case?

What if such job tasks are assigned by supervisors who are not gender blind in their assignments? Would this affect promotability?

First, interestingly, research shows that men and women differ in how they approach challenging tasks.

Women are, indeed, less inclined to take up challenging tasks than men because they want to avoid failure. Men, on the other hand, are more willing to take up such tasks because they want to show what they can do.

This is a difference that could stem from upbringing. Parents cheer a son when he is active or perhaps climbing up a tree; but would caution a daughter to be careful and instead come down from that tree.

Such differences in upbringing affect one’s willingness to take on challenging tasks as adults.

Of course, there are women who are eager to take on challenges.

However, they face obstacles as research has also shown that supervisors are more inclined to allocate less challenging tasks to female employees, regardless of their ambition and job performance.

Delegating assignments to employees involves risks, and to reduce such risks, managers often delegate difficult tasks to those whom they trust to do well – specifically, subordinates who are like them, are perceived to be similar to them, and hence, more trustworthy and capable.

As most higher positions are occupied by men, they see male subordinates as more similar to themselves than female subordinates. As such, male supervisors allocate more challenging tasks to male, rather than female employees – a form of subtle gender discrimination that they may not even be aware of.

In short, we are in a situation where women may both avoid and be denied important developmental opportunities, which in turn hamper their chances of promotion and career advancement.

It is worth saying again that to stay competitive, firms must capitalise on all valuable resources, including talented male and female employees.

Women’s failure to advance can be costly and short-sighted. There may be lost productivity and high turnover rates because women feel blocked in their careers.

Particularly, we need to ensure that managers overcome supervisory gender biases. They should be encouraged to assign challenging work equally to their male and female subordinates.

At the same time, women should be made aware of their propensity to take up less challenging tasks and the adverse consequences these have on their careers.

Parents should also be mindful in how they bring up their children. Both sons and daughters should be encouraged to go for challenging tasks.

The very successful charm offensive upon the United States last year by the China’s first lady, Peng Liyuan, underlines the role Chinese women can play in the international arena. The announcement that China will end its one-child policy may hopefully cause a leviathan shift in how girls are viewed, and how women will be valued in corporate China.

Irene de Pater is an assistant professor of management and organisation at the National University of Singapore Business School