Women’s career advancement: review of literature and future research agenda

• Date: 07 June 2023
• Pages: 232-255
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOES-12-2022-0313
• Published date: 07 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Economics,Social economics
• Author: Seema Das,Sumi Jha

Women’s career advancement:

review of literature and future

research agenda

Seema Das and Sumi Jha

Department of Organization Behaviour and Human Resource,

National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai, India

Abstract

Purpose –Despite the signif‌icanceof a gender-diverse workforce, there is a lack of comprehensivereview of

gender diversityand women’s career advancement literature. Moreover,past literature focuses on women-on-

board and other subsetsbased on outcomes like f‌irm f‌inancial and non-f‌inancial performance,corporate social

performance and board interlocks. The purpose of this studyis to examine the research on gender diversity

and women’s career advancement through an analysis of 143 articles published during past decade.

Theoretical frameworks, contexts and constructs-based contribution to scholarship were reviewed. The

authors attemptto highlight key theories, constructs and contexts and providedirection for future research.

Design/methodology/approach –A comprehensive systematic literature review of 143 articles

spanningJanuary 2008–March 2023 about gender diversity and women’s careeradvancement was conducted.

Findings –Majority of the past studies have focused on women on board and top managementteam, and most

of them have been conducted in the context of the USA and China. There is no specif‌ic industry which has been

covered extensively. Resource dependency, resource-based views and agency theories are the primary theoretical

frameworks used in the past studies. Furthermore,these f‌indings suggest the scope to further focus on women’s

retention and career growthinitiatives, especially at levels other than top levels, for a stronger leadership pipeline.

Originality/value –This study has been conductedwith a focused analysis of the context, constructsand

theoretical frameworks, enabling future researchers to decide how and where to focus, to now strengthen

retentionof women.

Keywords Career advancement, Diversity, Inclusion, Retention, Women

Paper type Literature review

1. Introduction

Extant literature strengthens thebusiness case for gender diversity at the board levels and

establishes the importanceof having a gender-balanced board and leadershipteam (Roh and

Kim, 2016;Hoobler et al., 2018). This initiative aligns with the organization’s prerogativein

the past two decades for implementing gender diversity to ensure responsibility, integrity,

eff‌icient management, competitiveness and legitimacy of the f‌irm (Rendtorff, 2011). Prior

research suggests tools and means for ref‌ining the recruitment and selection process to

reduce biases while hiring (Moore, 2015;Gregori

cet al., 2017); few studies have highlighted

the barriers women facewhen appointed on boards (Chanland and Murphy, 2018). However,

organizations worldwide are facing challenges in making this a success. Though they roll

out policies, the adoption process fails, as the cultural change remainsunaddressed (Zheng,

2022;Opoku and Williams, 2019;Dobbin and Kalev, 2016). Second-generation bias which

differs from f‌irst-generation gender bias in the way that it is not deliberate and can be

unconscious poses a more considerable barrier for success; for example, allowing women

part-time work to cope with long hours of workderails their career in the long term as part

time has less or recognition (Ely and Thomas, 2020).

IJOES

40,2

232

Received25 December 2022

Revised8 May 2023

Accepted11 May 2023

InternationalJournal of Ethics and

Systems

Vol.40 No. 2, 2024

pp. 232-255

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2514-9369

DOI 10.1108/IJOES-12-2022-0313

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2514-9369.htm

Previous literature review-based studies in gender diversity have focussed on specif‌ic

areas like the inf‌luence of women directors on corporate social performance (Campopiano

et al., 2022), the issue of board interlocks and its role in making them inf‌luential (Öberg,

2020), corporate f‌inancial and non-f‌inancial performance with women on board (Nguyen

et al., 2020) and bibliometric analysisof board gender diversity (Baker et al., 2020)to name a

few.

In this context, it is imperative that while being ambitious about gender diversity and

equity targets, the retention mechanisms of the female workforce need to be strengthened

within organizations. The fact that women are dropping out of the workforce more than

before signals the lacunae in retention and advancement initiatives for women by

organizations at large(Women in Workplace Report, 2022).

Therefore, Triana et al. (2021) suggest examining the bundles of diversity and inclusion

initiatives and how they relate to outcomes such as retention and diversity climate

perceptions. Shi et al.(2018)suggest investigating the chief diversity off‌icers’adoption

consequences, such as effective diversity and inclusionmanagement initiatives, and visible

drop in attrition rates of women. Festing et al. (2015)suggest examining HR practices more

broadly in other nationalcontexts (other than China, France, Germany, South Africaand the

USA) and understand if gendered practices in organizations adversely impact recruitment

and retention of women talent. Lee and Kim (2020) have highlighted that despite gender

being an important social categoryof diversity, they had to exclude it because of the lack of

female workforce in Koreanmanufacturing f‌irms, highlighting the pressing issue of women

workforce globallyin specif‌ic sectors.

In the past decade, most of the studies on this subject have focussed on strengthening

the business case for women on board and top management team (TMT) with few

discussing diversity and inclusion practices. Given the above, we aim to conduct a

comprehensive literature review on gender diversity and women’s career advancement.

Next, the study details the methodology, structures of the f‌indings, discussions and

future research agenda basis theoretical frameworks, constructs and related themes and

contexts.

2. Methodology

Given the above evolution, we used the systematic literature review (SLR) popularly

followed and cited in review articles like Paul and Feliciano-Cestero (2021),Ibrahim et al.

(2022),Lu et al. (2022) andAlhossini et al. (2021). This SLR was conducted with the following

steps. The inclusion and exclusionprocess for SLR article is shown in Figure 1.

By reading latest papers on gender diversity and women’s career advancement, we

decided the topic for this SLR. The literature on “genderdiversity”is varied and published

across multiple journals. With a focus on management practices and decisions, the study

aimed to review the area of workplace gender diversity across different domains, with a

business case and the bottom-lineargument as the baseline.

For Database selection,f‌irst, the authors looked at primary sources like EBSCO, Web of

Science (WoS) and Google Scholar. However, f‌inally, we took reference of WoS. WoS is

regarded as the world’s most extensive scientif‌ic citation search and analytical information

database, and the classif‌ication system’saccuracy is superior to others (Phoong et al., 2022).

Then the following keywords were used: diversity, inclusion, diversity and inclusion, gender

diversity and women career advancement. These keywords were assessed while f‌inalizing

the topic of the SLR by looking at keywordsof previous literature.

Further, the articles were included based on the selection criteria. Initial search resulted

in 6,849 articles published in English as an outcome of given keyword search. As the SLR

Women’s

career

advancement

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