Attitudes to women in management: An analysis of West Midlands businesses

The Labour Force Survey estimates that there are now well over a million women managers and administrators in Great Britain, accounting for over 11 per cent of all employed women[1]. This same survey reveals that 83 per cent of these women managers work within the service sector. Much of the research about senior women managers reflects this distribution with studies focusing particularly on the public sector[2,3]. A further characteristic of this literature, particularly that part of it which aims to highlight good practice, is its concentration on large organizations (i.e. those employing more than 1,000 persons). As a consequence, we know relatively little about the situations facing those women managers who work within the primary or secondary sectors or outside the large firm sector - there is also a dearth of studies focusing on specific regional settings and regional-industrial cultures. In this paper, we begin to redress this imbalance on the basis of an analysis of data from a survey of West Midlands businesses[4] - a region with a traditional focus on engineering and manufacturing employment in general and the car industry in particular. The survey sought information and views from the most senior person in a representative sample of organizations in the region. in total, responses were obtained from 1,066 West Midlands businesses. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents were operating within manufacturing or construction firms and 84 per cent of respondents were drawn from organizations with less than 200 employees