Overview
- Features a large number of interviews with typically hard-to-reach respondents (directors, senior executives, and chairs of FTSE 350 companies)
- Provides a detailed and nuanced depiction of the board selection process
- Critiques existing theories accounting for womens’ under-representation on boards
- Introduces the concept of the network trap, and explores the difficulties women face in developing network relationships with key organisational decision-makers
- Highlights the practical implications for organisations and regulators in understanding the lack of women in board level roles and in supporting women into such roles
Part of the book series: Work, Organization, and Employment (WOAE)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
As we begin the third decade of the twenty-first century, women have entered the workplace in unprecedented numbers, are now outperforming men in terms of educational qualifications, and are excelling across a range of professional fields. Yet men continue to occupy the positions of real power in large corporations.
This book draws on unique, unprecedented access to Chairs of FTSE 350 Chairs, boardroom aspirants and executive head-hunters, to explain why this is the case.
The analysis it presents establishes that the relative absence of women in boardroom roles is not explained by their lack of relevant skills, experience or ambition, but instead by their exclusion from the powerful male-dominated networks of key organisational decision-makers. It is from within these networks that candidates are sourced, endorsed, sponsored, and championed. Yet women’s efforts to penetrate these networks are instead likely to trap them into network relationships that will beof little value in helping them to fulfil their career aspirations.
The analysis also identifies why women struggle to gain access to these networks, and in doing so, it demonstrates that the network trap in which women find themselves will not be overcome simply by encouraging them to change their networking behaviours. Instead, there is a need for a fundamental reconsideration of how boardroom recruitment and selection is conducted and regulated, to ensure the development of a more open, transparent and equitable process.
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Meryl Bushell PhD is Visiting Fellow, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. She has many years of senior management experience in FTSE 100 organisations. She is an established and experienced non-executive Director and a strategic advisor to public and private sector bodies.
Kim Hoque is Professor of Human Resource Management at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and is the Director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit. He has published widely across the employment relations, human resource management and equality and diversity fields. He has worked closely in either an advisory or consultancy capacity with both public and private sector organisations, trade unions, government agencies, and Parliamentary bodies.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Network Trap
Book Subtitle: Why Women Struggle to Make it into the Boardroom
Authors: Meryl Bushell, Kim Hoque, Deborah Dean
Series Title: Work, Organization, and Employment
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0878-3
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: Business and Management, Business and Management (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-15-0877-6Published: 29 April 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-15-0880-6Published: 29 April 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-981-15-0878-3Published: 28 April 2020
Series ISSN: 2520-8837
Series E-ISSN: 2520-8845
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 140
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Diversity Management/Women in Business, Women's Studies, Careers in Business and Management