MORE than one in five men would, or does, find it difficult to work for a woman manager, and nearly one in three thinks women should not combine a management career with motherhood, a Price Waterhouse survey of over 1,000 top executives in the West Midlands reveals.
Almost a quarter of the area's businesses do not employ women managers-and this rises to almost one in three in the construction sector and companies employing fewer than 20 people.
While women executives generally are better educated than men-only 16pc of men had a degree compared with 24pc of women -they tend to have lower status managerial jobs.
There is little support for overt forms of positive discrimination for women managers, either from men or from women. While 40pc of surveyed male chairmen thought women should not combine a career in management with motherhood, only 27pc of male respondents in other positions in businesses held the same view.
The top-flight of the management hierarchy is even more of a male preserve, with access controlled by men.
While 44pc of men with no formal qualifications thought women should not combine a career with motherhood, that dropped to 15pc for those with a university education. And while 26pc of those educated to below A-level standard would find difficulty in working for a woman manager, the equivalent figure for the university educated-graduate and postgraduate-is, again, 15pc.
Men under 40 are twice as likely to favour positive discrimination for women as those aged over 40. A U-shaped response by age shows the over-60s and the under-30s being least disposed to women combining a career and motherhood.
Men under 50 take a more favourable view than the over-50s, which suggests an easing of prejudices as younger managers move through the system-unless their views change as they age.
As would be expected, people who employ women have fewer prejudices than those who do not. For example, senior male managers in construction are less in favour of positive discrimination, less in favour of women combining a career with motherhood and less in favour of women receiving equal treatment than their male counterparts in other industrial sectors.
Senior male managers in companies employing more than 200 people are more favourably disposed to women in management. They think women have positive skills but they believe there are no differences between men and women managers, they are in favour of positive discrimination and of women combining a career and motherhood, and they are more amenable to the idea of working for a woman manager than men in small and medium-sized enterprises.
Les Worrall is Professor of Strategic Analysis at Wolverhampton Business School and Cary L Cooper is Professor of Organisational Psychology at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.
