Women in Management: Organizational Socialization and Assessment Practices that Prevent Career Advancement

This paper reviews some of the literature on women in management in the UK, with particular emphasis on the biographical data collected in major studies. In view of the small proportions of women in senior management it seeks to identify the potential barriers that assessment procedures create for women wanting to progress to top positions. As organizations are encouraged to increase the‘fairness’and 'sophistication’of these procedures, they may in fact be reinforcing the very nature of the discriminations they are supposedly attempting to reduce. This paper outlines how this may be happening.