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Women in Leadership

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Yi-Ting Chung
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Draft Due: May 28 Women were regarded as a minority group in early society, and although discrimination toward women is illegal now, there still are some difficulties that women face in the workplace. This article, written by Carol P. Harvey and Deborah L. Larsen, is titled “ Women In Leadership Positions: Why Aren’t They There Yet?”. The thesis of this article is that women in leadership positions struggle under the stereotype of gender expectations. To illustrate, the authors develop some differences between males and females, and discuss stereotypes of gender; at the end they explore possible reasons why women have difficulties in the workforce. At the very beginning of this article, the author gives us a chain of statistics and indicates a fact that the percentage of female representative roles, such as CEO, and Board members, are inferior to the percentage of males. Then the authors refer to a stereotype called “horizontally segregate” and ”vertical segregate”, which means either a field the women put themselves in women dominant workplaces or men are more likely promoted than women respectively. These concepts caused an unchangeable wage gap in female and male, seventy-seven cent to one dollar on average. Accordingly, the author looks to gender differences and gives a main idea that “Males tend to use a more transactional leadership style while females tend to use more transformational one.”(p.133) The stereotype of females being sensitive, emotional and unassertive is taken as weakness for women pursuing leadership positions. “Gender,” as the authors mention in the article, “is a socially constructed characteristic consisting of behaviors and attitudes considered proper for males and females.”(p.132) The writer notices that the long history of male-dominated society imposes a strong image on female gender which women

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