EHRD 613: Career Development in HRD
Team F : Brooke Alexander, Nusrat Jahan Toma ❖ There is a gender gap in hiring and promoting qualified women into
Koiulaokekaimalie Lau, Katherine Rowden, Samantha Gonzales
Career Development Intervention Job Aid on ❖ There is gender disparity in compensation for men and women in
Throughout history, females have always been looked at as the weaker sex,
more emotional, more nurturing. However, as evidenced by recent gender
equality movements, women in management and leadership positions are
becoming increasingly visual but there remains lots of work to be done on
creating an equal playing field within the workplace. We need to focus on two
main things if women fully realize the possibilities for change in leadership
culture; the code of silence must be broken, and women’s leadership
problems need to be consciously connected to the broader social problem.
Moreover, cooperative learning for women embodies a core instructional
principle - learners can support and teach one another, and this interactivity
makes the instruction more robust, engaging, and effective. Ultimately, the
real-world examples are important along with a good text to explore and
revise their knowledge for the leadership position.
Inform the User
a leadership position.
leadership roles.
❖ Work-life balance can be challenging for women in leadership roles.
Despite the number of women who combine the daunting challenge
of graduate school and motherhood, contemporary society still
holds women responsible for most of the work associated with
child-rearing and home management.
❖ Females are not as present in leadership roles as males are.
❖ Not everyone feels comfortable with women in leadership positions.
“Only 41% of people in Germany said they felt very comfortable
with a woman being the head of government, despite Angela
Merkel’s long-time chancellorship” (Ro, 2021).
Ultimately, to build a sustainable workplace and society for women
leaders, three factors need to be considered - cooperative learning,
training, and transfer of learning.
 Providing
Content to
Educate
❖ Historically different occupations have been geared towards a specific
gender. As young adolescents, “girls [tend] to list health-related,
writing, art, and entertainment-related fields” (Giannantonio &
Hurley-Hanson, 2006, p. 320). With the increase in women’s
leadership, more females are entering into male-dominant careers
such as finance, supply chain management, and aviation.
❖ Harvard Business Review found in a recent study men and women in
leadership are making similar incomes but explain their leadership
styles differently.
❖ However, “Across all age groups, the median hourly wage for women
last year was 84% as much as men – $14.90 vs. $17.79, up from 64%
in 1980. Across all age groups, 22% of women and 9% of men report
having quit jobs for family reasons at some point during their working
lives” (InPower Consulting LLC, 2020).
❖ Women discussed their leadership style is successful “not by
adopting the style and habits that have proved successful for men
but by drawing on the skills and attitudes they developed from their
shared experience as women” (Rosener, 2014).
❖ Glass Cliff: Organizations who are looking to blame mistakes on new
leadership or especially women leadership will promote a woman
into a position only to see her fail. Individuals must be vigilant of
these “opportunities” and not mistake them for increased diversity or
improved career development efforts.
Following
OD Tools
1. Conduct needs assessment of women’s challenges and gaps in skills.
2. Evaluate company metrics on women in leadership positions as a benchmark.
3. Attract and recruit qualified women in leadership roles.
4. Form recruiting and retention guidelines to encourage females to apply such as:
Inclusive language and pronouns, not using male focused terminology creating a
positive experience for work life balance and pay women comparable to male
counterparts.
5. Implement, and evaluate best practice strategies for women’s leadership
development by learning methods for on-the-job training, observation, coaching,
mentoring, and growth assignments.
6. Facilitate Staged Self-Directed Learning (SSDL) model as applicable and valuable for
women towards being independent or highly self-directed learners in the
organization.
7. Transfer of training and experiential learning for the women who are in managerial
position and leadership roles. One way of doing so is by developing a formal mentor
program pairing junior and senior-level talent
References:
Giannantonio, C. M., & Hurley-Hanson, A. E. (2006). Applying Image Norms Across
Super’s Career Development Stages. Career Development Quarterly, 54(4), 318–330.
K. Holtz, Stephens B. Springer, and Carrie J. Boden-McGill. (Eds). (2015). Building
sustainable futures for adult learners.
Ro, C. (2021, January 19). Why do we still distrust women leaders? Retrieved April 13,
2021,
Rosener, J. (2014, August 01). Ways women lead. Retrieved from
https://hbr.org/1990/11/ways-women-lead
InPower Consulting. (2014) A Historical Perspective to Women in Leadership. Retrieved
from https://inpowercoaching.com/historical-perspective-women-leadership/