Breaking through the barriers: How women can succeed in male-dominated professions

If you scroll through LinkedIn, you’ll see feed alight with ‘girl boss’ energy and examples of women excelling in their studies, attending leadership and entrepreneurship conferences, and being promoted to strategists, senior writers and more. But this is only a tiny sliver of the working female population, and likely women in your close or extended social circles. What is the situation when it comes to women working in male-dominated professions across the globe? Are they taking names like your feed suggests? Or are they facing a harsher reality?

Male dominated professions are defined as those with 25% or fewer female employees, and include fields like engineering, computer information technology, computer gaming, architecture and pilots to name a few. A large proportion of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) professions are male dominated.

In South Africa, industries like heavy manufacturing and production are exclusively male dominated, and most women employed are relegated to fulfil clerical and support roles – roles that are seen as ‘best suited’ to the stereotypical nurturer/carer role women have played for centuries. These are insights from master’s student Phiona Martin, who herself worked in the mining industry. She describes her experiences as “sexist [and] gender-oppressive, coupled with a patriarchal culture and “boys club” mentality”.

Sadly, her experience is not unique and is the reality for countless women across male-dominated industries. A study on female engineering graduates in the US sought to understand why they leave the engineering profession – “it’s been estimated that nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter the profession.” One of the major reasons was the “hegemonic masculine culture of engineering”. Both when doing class assignments and during internships at engineering firms, women were relegated to doing menial tasks such as paper sorting, collecting equipment and writing notes – the real technical and problem-solving opportunities were given to men and, in some instances, men who were far less experienced. This was just a taste of the engineering world for female graduates, never mind moving into this environment full-time

Research has articulated certain factors as significant in stalling women from making professional inroads, aside from the ‘boys club’ working environment many women experience:

1 – Lack of organisational support.

This applies in terms of company policy, way-of-work and general managerial buy-in. Company policies relate to things like maternity leave, child-care allowances, and compassionate leave, while way-of-work comes down to the more nitty-gritty of your day to day – work start times, end times, overtime, on-the-road vs office-based projects and more. You also need buy-in from the top management – if the CEO doesn’t support female empowerment and career growth, the rest of the organisation won’t either.

2 – Domestic division of labour.

Stereotypically, and in a South African context specifically, men are still (for the most part) viewed as breadwinners which places certain gendered expectations on the role women need to occupy – those of the more domestic and caregiving variety. It also means women are relegated to the periphery in terms of financial decision-making. Added to this is the cultural superstition of a woman’s presence as bad luck at work, making her inroads into male-dominated professions even more challenging.

3 – Discriminatory perceptions and reinforced stereotypes.

Research has pointed to success being okay for women if they excel in an area ‘fitting’ for them i.e., stereotypical, female-appropriate professions that work with people or require high levels of empathy. But when they excel in traditionally male-occupied roles, this success marks them as “selfish, manipulative and untrustworthy”. Martin’s research also discusses this double-edged sword in the context of trying to get ahead. She describes how, if women adopt a ‘feminine’ managerial style it opens them up to being perceived as ineffective or too soft, while a ‘masculine’ style is seen as strident and not feminine enough.

The tides are turning in supporting women in more male-dominated roles, and movements like HeForShe (the United Nations global solidarity movement for gender equality) and Women Deliver are helping put vital resources in the hands of women and starting important conversations. There is still a lot of work to be done, but support does exist.

How to get more women around the boardroom table, and into leadership positions

The first step is to consider the positive impact women in leadership positions can have on your business’s performance. A 20-year study by The Peterson Institute for International Economics found that “having more women leaders in high levels of corporate management correlated with increased profitability.”

The second, is to make sitting around the boardroom table accessible and achievable. If you’re a business, you can do this by encouraging women to move into more managerial and leadership roles. It’s that simple. The positive impact of this will be representation, which leads to a cycle of positivity. According to the Harvard Business Review: “when women are exposed to powerful female role models, they are more likely to endorse the notion that women are well suited for leadership roles.”

If your female staff need additional training or skills to take on these roles, consider partnering with leading education institutions. The Economist has curated a list of the top women leadership courses across the globe, from the Netherlands to Australia. You can explore these courses here. There are also inexpensive and even free online courses available through Coursera, Udemy and edX. Simply search for ‘women leadership’.

Making leadership roles accessible for women also means interviewing qualified women for every open leadership role according to Forbes.

If you’re an individual, wanting access to the boardroom table can have you feeling a little anxious, which is perfectly normal especially in male-dominated fields. A technique to combat this according to cognitive scientist and author Sian Beilock is to commit your thoughts to paper – write out whatever you’re feeling, any doubts and second guesses, and acknowledge your fear. This has been shown to “decrease worries and rumination and boost the ability to concentrate and focus”.

Finding a strong female mentor in a leadership position is another potential avenue you could explore, both within your organisation or outside of it. There are strong female-centric mentoring communities online that connect you to women in leadership across the globe. Women Who Create is a mentorship programme specially for women of colour across industries like advertising, tech and entrepreneurship, while Women in Tech® is a global non-profit seeking to close the gender gap and help embrace women in technology through mentoring programmes (and advocacy).

iLodge is a proudly woman-led organisation and strives for increased female representation in the logistics, transport, engineering and project management industry.