Measures that would help move women up in the corporate environment

  Hilary Clinton and Theresa May attained leadership positions by fighting tooth and nail to get there. There is a need for us to look at a few measures that can be used to prop women up by human resource departments and managers. Mind you we are not talking about affirmative action here, just to give the ladies a smooth ride that the men enjoy in the same environment. Ibukun Awosika is a very good example of a woman in corporate leadership. She made her way to become the first woman chair of a major financial corporation in Nigeria. Some of the interesting measures that corporate environments ought to evolve to ensure that more qualified and efficient women get to leadership positions is: Integrate women's development into mainstream human resource policies, mentoring and providing role models, reviewing equal opportunity policies, auditing attitudes towards women in the work place, providing women only training to encourage such women who are really interested to climb to the top of the corporate ladder. Also, equality needs to be put on the organizational agenda and there should be proper review of selection and promotion appraisal processes. Men networks tend to flourish in the work environment, so there is a need to strengthen women networks or get the women aligned with the men. Women also need to undergo assertive training so that they can get their ideas adopted with out being outwardly and unnecessarily strict. If all these are accomplished, it would be easy to move women out of the "ghetto" positions to the front line. The career paths in larger organizations should either take women into cognizance or align them women so that training would lead to development for them and eventually there would more credible women managers emerging in the contemporary organization.  

There is also the problem of chauvinism, which strangely enough has created the concept of the glass ceiling in the minds of both sexes in leadership. Clinton recently claimed that she took a great crack at the glass ceiling while being nominated the first women to represent a major political party in a presidential election in the United States. That ceiling could get wider if she becomes president in November. The truth is hundreds of women are being turned away from positions in which they could do well if they were only given a fair chance. To make that chance fair, the entire organizations involved have to streamline policies that would ensure that women are not treated any differently from men.