Dawn Leane examines the main barriers to success experienced by women and what organisations can do to break the career inhibitors down

In workshops organised after the publication of the research study carried out by Fiona Dent and Viki Holton for their book Women in Business: Navigating Career Success, women were asked to identify factors they believed had hindered their progress. Their responses are broadly categorised as follows:

• Limiting beliefs;
• Family issues;
• Work colleagues;
• Personal style and skills;
• Lack of organisational support;
• Gender issues;
• Taking the wrong career path; and
• Politics and bureaucracy.

The most frequently mentioned issues focus on self-doubt and limiting beliefs. As this is a nuanced subject, it is important to distinguish between limiting beliefs and confidence. 

Limiting beliefs vs confidence

Beliefs are assumed truths developed over time from our direct experiences and observations. They usually don’t exist as explicit propositions. We may barely be aware of them, but they influence what we think, say, and do.  When they manifest self-doubt, they become limiting beliefs.

An example of a limiting belief may be ‘I can’t handle conflict’, which could lead to a lack of assertiveness or the tendency to give in to others.

Limiting beliefs can have a significantly negative impact on our ability to achieve our full potential.

Confidence, however, can be significantly influenced by workplace culture. Women are regularly told that they should be more confident, which is particularly unhelpful as it puts the responsibility firmly back on women, as opposed to examining the environment as a contributing factor.

One way in which the office environment can impact confidence is ‘backlash avoidance mechanism’, whereby women feel uncomfortable self-promoting due to perceived social consequences.

Feedback and career development

In the workshop, 59 percent of participants believed that men and women are judged unequally, particularly when it comes to feedback and development in the workplace.

This is supported by the Women in the Workplace study—a study of US women in the workplace conducted by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company—which found that women report receiving feedback much less frequently than their male co-workers.

In fact, women are more than 20 percent less likely than men to receive difficult feedback, which is essential to improving performance. One reason cited by managers is their fear of an emotional response, which is less of a concern when giving feedback to male employees.

Further, the feedback that women receive is often vague and non-specific.

In their Harvard Business Review article, ‘Research: Vague Feedback is Holding Women Back’, Shelly J. Correll and Caroline Simard advised that “women are systematically less likely to receive specific feedback tied to outcomes, both when they receive praise and when the feedback is developmental.” They also found that when women did receive feedback, it was largely focused on their style of communication.

Family issues

While it is widely accepted that family issues can be a barrier to success, most participants in Dent and Holton’s research recognised that decisions made in relation to family life require compromise—and that it was typically the woman in the relationship who compromised out of personal choice. Many women accepted this as an inevitable consequence of motherhood and feel obliged to take responsibility and be available for their children.

Managing employee long-term success

The overarching message from these pieces of research is that what happens early in a woman's career significantly impacts her long-term success.

It is important that both the career accelerators and inhibitors discussed in this series are considered by organisations when developing talent management and career development programmes.

You can read the first two articles in this series:

Empowering women for better balance in the workplace

Four success factors for women in the workplace

Dawn Leane is Founder of Leane Leaders and Leane Empower.