Una partecita de Boyacá y Cundinamarca representada en Valle de Tenza

Gender polarisation in organisations ultimately results in an unlevel playing field for women in management. Female managers in this study did not

necessarily believe that women were better managers, nor did they believe that their experiences of management were the same as those of men. They felt that women in managerial roles were caught between dichotomous modes of

behaviour, feminine and masculine. As reported by Sheppard (1992) and Stiver (1991) masculinity is equated with being business like and professional. In trying

to understand what ‘being professional’ means, Stiver (1991) suggested that the professional is equated to ‘being like a man’ in so far as it coincides with a fantasy that involves ‘men [moving] through every work situation strong, confident, self- sufficient, and clearly not emotional, because to be emotional is the worst kind of unprofessionalism’ (p.228). The women in this study were caught in junctures between prescriptive gender categories, describing instances where they were often criticised for being too masculine or too feminine by both men and women. In accordance with the gender-centred perspective (Fagenson, 1990; Schein, 1973), some managers’ experiences with women in management were that they could be too aggressive or controlling and that there was greater pressures placed on them to succeed.

Both men and women expressed negative reactions towards overly aggressive women, yet men in particular had more positive reactions to women portraying nurturing and caring characteristics. Women felt pressures from stereotypes about leadership and the ‘good manager’. To survive in the

organisation, they felt that they had to adopt a masculine modality of behaviour. However, they were often criticised for being too masculine or too feminine by both men and women. Women participants indicated that being too feminine consisted in characteristics such as being too sympathetic, too caring, not objective, frightened and insecure. Being too masculine consisted in being too aggressive, and not communicative. As one female manager in ComputerOrg stated:

I suppose there’s two ways to look at it, for a women to succeed in the ... area she has to be better than the guys. If you’re considered assertive they’ll make sure that they put you in your place. If you’re submissive than that’s ok, so that’s a more subtle thing that happens. I just think it comes back to the very old thing that women are still a bit fearful of being too dominant with a man and men are still frightened of very dominant

women, so a women knows if she is too dominant it can cause problems.

In general women are scrutinised by men and other women for out of role behaviour, informed by a criteria sourced from notions of stereotypical femininity.

For women to deviate from this style involves risk as they are most likely to be described in negative feminine terms (Powell & Butterfield, 1989). The excerpt below, from a woman in EducOrg, is an example of such scrutiny. The young woman who behaves in a masculine mode is not only perceived in negative terms (that is, ‘too aggressive’) but also in feminine negative terms (that is, ‘insecure’):

I can understand how a lot of the females could feel insecure. I think that’s with age as well. A lot of the younger ones, they've got to prove that their better than the men, so they become too aggressive.

Men acknowledged that women felt they had to be ‘better’ than men, and the women themselves reported feeling more pressure to succeed in their role in management. This sometimes resulted in disconcerting work practices such as being less likely to delegate tasks:

I think that women managers work a lot harder at perhaps the hands on stuff. They are less likely to delegate tasks because that could be seen as a weakness whereas the men will sit around and talk and happily delegate and then just pick up the results of the delegation.

Many women in management roles were aware that to directly change the status quo involved risks to their positions, while others perceived the risk to be for the men in the organisation themselves. The following excerpt is from a female senior manager in a financial services organisation who discussed the political risk involved in confronting the status quo head on:

I see women doing it in a way that I think is the wrong way quite often. I see them getting……very aggressive, and trying to impose themselves on the status quo which in my book is a waste of energy because people [who] have got the power…… are perfectly capable of dismissing you from their minds. I mean you're just not an issue, and so you've got to get them on side. You've got to try to work with the people who are in positions of power and influence [them].

Women in management perhaps face extra pressures due to the lack of equal choices they have in moving between gendered cultures. Therefore, the contact

zone between masculinity and femininity for these women is one restricted in choice. This constrains the benefits women may have ordinarily received from bicultural competence across gendered domains. So for women in management this may lead to further identity confusion and conflict as proposed by

LaFromboise et.al. (1995). It may also explain the findings by Sheppard (1992) that showed isolation and discrimination to be recurring themes in women’s descriptions of themselves at work.