ABSTRACT
Women have made great strides toward inclusion in a male-dominated world of work over the past 50 years. Progress showed small wins for women showing up in leadership roles from entry- to senior-level positions. Yet, importantly, breakthroughs in the glass ceiling remained uneven, allowing White middle-class women larger births for passage, limiting women of color to scarce opportunities to slip precariously through the cracks. And, then what? The world faced the worst global pandemic of our time, disrupting every aspect of life and how we live it. The threat to equity in women’s work enormously intensified, threatening modest gains in ascending to top leadership ranks. Tenacious barriers to senior leadership are at a pinnacle. Women’s career equality has been defined as “an individual and organizational phenomenon involving the degree to which women (a) have equal access to and participation in career opportunities, and (b) experience equal intrinsic (e.g., job, life, family satisfaction) and extrinsic (e.g., pay, promotions) work and nonwork outcomes compared to men” (Kossek et al., 2017, p. 228). Understanding women’s experiences embedded within work and non-work environments points the way toward individual developmental growth, organizational change, and policy reform. Turning to leadership theory and research, this essay highlights gender inequities in leadership selection and development, and the importance of work and non-work contexts, in attaining equitable leadership opportunities for women. Recommendations are framed from a social responsibility perspective. From the midst of uncertainty in a complex medley of change, the opportunity to evoke change awaits in this kaleidoscope world.
