What Would You Sacriﬁce?
Access to Top Management
and the Work–life Balance
Cécile Guillaume* and Sophie Pochic
This article is based on a current research, combining quantitative (human
resources ﬁgures and statistics) and qualitative data (60 interviews with
career managers, top managers and high potential talents, both men and
women), conducted in a major French utility company on the subject
of diversity and more speciﬁcally on the issue of women’s access to top
management positions. The main purpose of this research is to understand
the difﬁculties women may encounter in the course of their occupational
career linked to organizational aspects, including the ‘glass ceiling’ processes,
informal norms related to management positions (such as time and
mobility constraints) and social and cultural representations attached to
leadership. The other perspective of this research focuses on the different
strategies women and men build either to conform to the organizational
norms or bypass them. The issue of work–life balance are therefore
addressed both from a corporate/organizational standpoint and an individual
and family perspective.
Keywords: managerial career, work–life balance, glass ceiling, women in management,
organization
The formal and informal requirements of
organizational careers
Even if a great amount has been written on organizational careers since the
1960s (Dalton, 1959; Glaser, 1968), these studies have rarely focused on the
articulation between work and private life, as if it was possible to separate
these two spheres of life. Conversely, women’s management studies have
shown the importance of combining paid and unpaid work in the analysis
of women’s difﬁculties in accessing power. Inspired by the American
Address for correspondence: *Cécile Guillaume Lise-CNRS, 59 rue Pouchet 75017 Paris, e-mail:
cecileguillaume@hotmail.com
Gender, Work and Organization.
© 2007 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
interactionist approach of ‘careers’ (Hughes, 1937) and the new French sociology
of cadres1
(Bouffartigue, 2001a), we propose to focus this article on the
forms and dynamics of managers’ careers in a French utility company, with a
speciﬁc emphasis on work–life balance issues and the formal and informal
requirements to access power.
In order to analyse occupational careers, Hughes (1937) recommends
focusing on the ‘turning points’ of occupational mobility, the circumstances of
choices and refusals, with a speciﬁc emphasis on the organizational criteria
and actors of promotion. Studying medical careers, Hall (1948) reveals that
a career can be conceived as a set of more or less successful adjustments to
the formal and informal norms of medical institutions — stages, rituals
and sponsorship system. Analysing an American industrial company, Dalton
(1959) also stresses that the level of education or seniority has less inﬂuence
on managerial careers than social origins and the membership of social networks.
More recently, Kanter (1977) has laid emphasis on the impact of social
conformity, structure of opportunity and distribution of power (mainly based
on alliances with powerful sponsors and peers’ support) in the success of
corporate careers, also showing the gendered bias of organizational structures
and processes. Since then and following the major contribution of Acker
and Van Houten (1974), many researchers have explored the links between
gender, power and organizations showing that ‘gender differences are
mobilised by organisational structures, rather than simply imported from
elsewhere into an essentially neutral organisational arena’ (Halford and
Leonard, 2000, p. 44).
Following this line of research, we made the choice to analyse the organizational
aspects of managerial careers in a large company, focusing our
empirical survey on three main questions: What are the organizational norms
required for accessing top management positions and their effects on work–
life balance? What is the status of women? What are the strategies invented by
men and women managers to conform to the prevailing career model or to
promote alternative patterns?
Methodology: the embeddedness of organizational careers
We have chosen to make an in-depth case study in a large state utility
company. This ﬁrm employs more than 30,000 people, is one of the largest
French industrial ﬁrms and is quoted on the CAC 40. Since its creation in
1946, the company has never experienced any major restructuration. Apart
from outsourcing non-qualiﬁed activities and the recent purchase of foreign
subsidiaries, the stability of the company has protected qualiﬁed employees
from the uncertainty of mergers and acquisitions. The deregulation of the
French energy market began only in 2004 under pressure from the European
Commission and, despite repeated union opposition (Wieviorka, 1996), the
2 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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partial privatization of the ﬁrm was decided in 2005 and the company is
now facing a very disputed merger project with another European utility
company. These recent changes have not yet affected the employment practices
and career management rules. Job security is still guaranteed and the
turnover of managers and professionals is very low (less than 1 per cent). The
structure of opportunity is quite typical of a bureaucratic career pattern
(Glaser, 1968): consisting of a ‘closed internal labour market’ (Paradeise,
1984), linear and vertical career movements, long processes of development
from entry-level management jobs to upper positions, with a large number of
moves (and tests) in between, a wide range of normative expectations (such
as social conformity and adhering to a prescribed set of roles) and the
requirement of loyalty to the organization. However, this career pattern is
biased by the particularities of the French education system. The ﬁeld of
opportunities is indeed clearly structured and limited by the hierarchy of
diplomas. Access to the highest managerial positions (and remunerations) is
reserved to the ‘Noblesse d’Etat’ (Bourdieu, 1989), coming from the most
prestigious ‘grandes écoles’ (engineering or business).
This ‘cultural’ background and the relation to the French State can partly
explain the permanence of this ‘old’ career management system. However, in
Europe and the USA, a contradictory debate has emerged in the 1990s about
the end of internal labour markets and the emergence of a new career model
based on ﬂexibility, lateral and external mobility and individual responsibility
and expertise for all managers and professionals. This ‘postentrepreneurial’
career (Kanter, 1989) or ‘portfolio’ career (Handy, 1989) or
‘boundaryless’ career (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996) has been identiﬁed as an
answer to contemporary business constraints and the ‘new spirit of capitalism’
(Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999). However, empirical data are very few or
limited to speciﬁc populations or professions. In France, quantitative studies
point out that managers and professionals form a very heterogeneous group,
and that external mobility depends on diploma, age, sector and economic
circumstances (Bouffartigue and Pochic, 2002; Dany, 2004). Uncertainty is
certainly growing for many employees, but managers (under 50 years old)
and high potential professionals are still protected from these turbulences,
mainly because companies want to retain them (Falcoz, 2001; Pochic, 2001).
From this perspective, the ﬁrm we are studying is representative of an ‘old
model’ that persists in many large corporations (Wajcman and Martin, 2001),
at least for a minority of privileged employees. Moreover, we believe that,
despite the important shifts of emphasis that have affected corporate jobs and
careers, the gender gap in large corporations can still be analysed using the
same theoretical grid (opportunity, power, culture and numbers).
Thus, in order to measure the ‘glass ceiling’ in this company and to select
our interviews, we have begun our survey by a quantitative analysis based on
the human resources (HR) information system. We were given access to an
anonymous HR database of all the 9600 managers and professionals of the
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company (covering all the qualiﬁed employees).2
This database contained
socio-demographic variables as sex, age, diploma (level and type) and family
situation (family status, spouse’s job, number of dependant children). It also
detailed static occupational variables such as seniority, job occupation, job
department, salary level, functional group (from GF12 to GF193
), full time or
part time, location. We managed to cross this database with two pieces of
conﬁdential information: the label, ‘high potential talent’ and rank in the scale
of responsibilities for top management positions (R4 to R1).
We interviewed 60 men and women managers from January to June 2005,
including 36 senior managers (20 women and 16 men aged from 39 to 58 years)
and 24 younger ‘high potential’ professionals and managers (20 women and
four men aged from 23 to 44 years). Since 1994, this ‘high ﬂyer’ label has been
attributed to young professionals or managers if they are perceived as possible
future senior managers. This selection relies on a set of formal and
informal procedures handled by the hierarchical line.4
Our qualitative
sample is representative of the diversity of job department (from ﬁnance
and sales to more technical ones, such as transport or research and development
[R&D]), family situation (single/couple, with or without children),
type of diploma (engineering, business administration, university) and
location (Paris area or ‘province’). Interviews were taped and analysed through
a thematic and a biographical grid (occupational, family and residential). It was
thus possible to make a link between the way senior managers (men and
women) have managed and perceived the work–life balance of their own
career and the way they manage their subordinates along that dimension.
A technical ﬁrm with a late feminization
One of the main results of the statistics analysis is the demonstration of the
clear process of horizontal and vertical job segmentation that affects women
in the company, underlining, like in many other studies, the ‘gendered takeover,
exclusion and occupational closure’ that is detrimental to women and
beneﬁcial to men (Witz, 1992).
The ‘glass ceiling’ permanence
If we look closely at the situation of women in the company, we are bound to
acknowledge that the feminization of management roles has considerably
risen in the last 15 years. Women count for 44 per cent of all managers aged
35 or less, whereas only 15 per cent of managers aged over 45 are women, as
Table 1 shows. This disparity reveals the recent feminization of a company
that used to hire and promote male engineers. However, if women are catching
up at the ﬁrst levels of management, they almost disappear when we look
at senior management positions. They are only 26 per cent in this ‘tilted’
4 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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group, which makes them switch from the status of tokens to that of a
minority (Kanter, 1977). The inﬂexion of the curve occurs from GF17
onwards. This step coincides with the age of 35–40 years, when family constraints
become strong. It is also a key stage before entering management
positions. From this point onwards, the glass ceiling becomes very visible and
women account for only 10 per cent of top managers, accessing these positions
at the end of their career. Women seem to progress more slowly than
men, experiencing repeated professional tests and challenges. Their career
promotion is very progressive. They rarely skip one step of the ladder, sometimes
accepting horizontal mobility, unlike their male colleagues who are
much more vigilant to the statutory aspects of their career progression (it is
not rare for engineers having graduated from the best schools to climb up the
ladder two grades at a time). Women access the ﬁrst levels of senior management
(R4–R3) later than men, except for a few engineers coming from prestigious
schools who ‘had the right to career promotion’ like their male
counterparts, or experienced women with rare expertise (ﬁnance, marketing,
sales) and social credentials either coming from other companies (and
Table 1: Feminization rate of executives, managers and professionals
Wage and
responsibility
scale
Young
managers
(< 35 years) (%)
Mid-career
(35–44 years)
(%)
End of career
(> 45 years)
(%)
Total
(%) N
R1 4.0 3.8 26
R2 7.5 8.6 70
R3 21.4 7.2 8.9 224
R4 22.4 9.6 12.0 359
Executive 22.2 8.3 10.3 679
GF 19 16.7 11.4 12.6 380
GF 18 29.1 11.3 16.9 496
GF 17 34.7 16.4 24.3 687
GF 16 44.7 31.6 18.4 25.6 704
GF 15 40.7 35.0 16.0 27.5 1083
GF 14 46.0 27.6 16.9 27.0 1487
GF 13 45.1 29.2 13.6 28.8 2075
GF 12 42.7 23.9 16.5 26.1 2055
Manager and
professional
44.2 29.3 15.3 25.8 8967
N 1965 2732 4949 9646
Source: human resources database, November 2004.
ACCESS TO TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE WORK–LIFE BALANCE 5
© 2007 The Author(s) Volume ** Number ** ** 2007
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entering the career ladder at the top) or having been mentored by male senior
managers.
The glass walls: gendered corporate career paths
The glass ceiling is not only due to the late entry of women in the company
and in the engineering schools, but is also linked to an obvious process of
horizontal job segmentation. Women are concentrated in traditional ‘velvet
ghettos’ (communication, ﬁnance, HR), as reveals Table 2, even if, in the last
10 years, the company has hired women with sales and marketing backgrounds
and women with high technical expertise (mostly linked to R&D and
geo-sciences). However, this relative diversiﬁcation of women’s careers conﬁrms
the fact that women usually build their career in narrow specialized
ﬁelds, avoiding managerial routes (Savage, 1992). As a matter of fact, most of
them are concentrated at the headquarters in Paris. Very few work in the
traditional core departments (energy trade, transportation and distribution).
They are more visible in the sales and marketing departments that are slowly
Table 2: Glass walls — horizontal segmentation of job occupations
Occupational groups
Feminization
rate (%) (Percentage) N
Feminized job (women > 30 per cent)
Communication 58.1 1.9 172
Law professionals 44.6 1.6 148
Research 35.3 3.5 314
Accounting ﬁnances 34.6 7.9 705
Marketing 32.9 10.7 963
Male job (women < 30 per cent)
Human resources 29.5 16.6 1534
Data processing 24.3 14.9 1335
Sales and customer services 23.1 10.5 945
Hygiene and safety 22.8 5.2 469
Trade of energy 23.0 2.5 226
Exploration and production 21.7 0.8 69
Logistics 15.5 2.0 181
Infrastructure construction 11.9 4.0 360
Infrastructure management 11.2 7.4 648
Infrastructure conception 8.8 4.3 387
Total managers and professionals 25.8 100*
Note: * small occupations groups are missing.
Source: human resources database, November 2004.
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gaining prestige over technical ones (and are therefore becoming more masculine).
However, even in those quite feminine departments, access of
women to top management remains difﬁcult.
A masculine career pattern
When exploring the requirements for success, we can distinguish three sorts
of promotion criteria — structural, cultural and organizational — all of which
involve drawbacks for women.
Formal speciﬁcations for career promotion: the gender-neutrality of
the organization
The reconstitution of senior managers’ careers reveals shared and quite inviolable
norms and patterns. As we have already pointed out, senior managers
have graduated from the most prestigious French schools of engineering and,
more recently, from famous French business schools. This ‘criterion of excellence’
is very detrimental for professionals with university degrees, as Table 3
shows. Even if the ability to meet objectives and results becomes progressively
a key factor for promotion, it does not compensate for the initial
educational handicap. Part of the existence of the glass ceiling is related to
educational background and the social hierarchy between diplomas for both
women and men (Bauer and Bertin-Mourot, 1987; Pochic, 2005). This qualiﬁcation
criterion is in itself detrimental for women. They have entered engineering
schools much later than men and are still much less numerous,
accounting for only 25 per cent of all engineering students (Marry, 2004).
However, since the mid 1980s the company has started to shift from the
dominance of engineers to the recruitment of professionals with commercial
and business backgrounds, offering more opportunities for women.
Despite this initial technical specialization, senior managers have accepted
a high level of functional and geographical mobility. For the ﬁrst 10 to 15
years of their career they have changed position (and most of the time location)
every three or four years. Managers are not supposed to build their
career in one site because they need to keep some distance from the local
social context, showing their loyalty to the organization ﬁrst. In that internal
market, geographical mobility is often presented as the norm to access top
executive positions. The majority of male executives have accepted at least
one move in their career, in France or in a foreign subsidiary, explaining how
risky it is to refuse this assignment. Once they have proved their technical
abilities, engineers are supposed to be generalists able to hold any kind of
managerial position — outside Paris and at the headquarters, in technical or
functional departments — following the traditional engineers’ career patterns
(Bouffartigue, 2001b; Flamand, 2002). They are expected to alternate between
ACCESS TO TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE WORK–LIFE BALANCE 7
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staff and line positions, usually between the Paris area and the provinces,
through a ‘spiralist’ career model (Pahl and Pahl, 1971). This expectation of
polyvalence does not apply to non-engineer professionals who are channelled
into expert occupations peripheral to central management. The managerial
side of the career is quite detrimental for those who do not want to experience
management positions (including engineers) or who are conﬁned to expertise
paths. Even external assessment has been built to favour professionals who
ﬁt the ‘technical managerial’ career pattern and demonstrate the necessary
breadth of work experience, including key ‘hard’ functions, conﬁrming the
hierarchy of career paths and diplomas (Guillaume and Pochic, 2007).
Career progression patterns also involve a strong correlation between age
and career ladder steps. Very high potential professionals must be detected
before the age of 35 and they need to reach the ﬁrst levels of senior management
positions (ranked GF18–19) before they are 40. In our sample, 186
persons have been labelled as having ‘potential’, with 35 per cent of women
in the ‘high potential’ category and even 50 per cent of women in the ‘very
high potential’ category (only 36 persons). As young professionals are hired in
GF12 positions when they are 25 years’ old, they need to spend less than three
years in each position to be able to reach level GF18–19 before 40. This rhythm
implies continuous involvement at work with no career breaks, and organizational
awareness to avoid dead-end positions or organizational hazards that
can slow down the career progression.
Last but not least, managerial careers are built around the learning of time
availability, starting with ‘on call’ operational constraints and continuing with
time-consuming responsibilities such as, ‘head of cabinet’. This emphasis put
on self-sacriﬁce is linked to the inheritance of a cultural conception of
working involvement that refers to the notions of a calling and selﬂessness
(Saglio, 1999). Like in many other state occupations, employees have chosen
to dedicate themselves to the service of the state (and the nation) and are not
supposed to count their time. But, more generally, this time-consuming
pattern reveals the importance of loyalty in corporate careers and the organization’s
demands for total devotion. All senior and high potential managers
work full time and, despite the fact that the legal working time is 35 hours a
week, most of them put in very long hours. As in many other companies,
‘those employed on a part-time basis have little or no chance of promotion to
management positions as these are speciﬁed as full-time’ (Brockbank and
Traves, 1996, p. 85), as shown in Table 3. If geographical mobility requirements
are less strong than before (except for new international assignments),
time availability is getting stronger as the company is progressively switching
from a bureaucratic and centralized type of organization to a more decentralized
matrix-like model. Co-ordination meetings are proliferating and add
to the norm of presence and the very French habit of endless and informal
discussions. Overall, temporal norms associated either with career progression
or working hours are very prejudicial for women. An intense working
8 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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involvement is required between the ages of 25 and 35 when they are likely
to have children and family constraints. This typical organizational career
pattern, linear and progressive, ignores individual life cycles and implicitly
assumes that managers are male.
Table 3: Access to top management after 45 years old
Men Model M Women Model W
Diploma
Group 1. Prestigious ‘grandes
écoles’ engineering schools
business schools
50.0 ** 29.0 **
51.0 35.0
43.0 21.0
Group 2. Acknowledged schools
or Bac + 5
23.5 ref. 10.0 ref.
Group 3. Small schools or Bac + 4 14.0 ** 10.0 ns
Bac + 2 0.5 ** 0.0 ns
Baca
or less 1.0 ** 0.0 **
Age 12.0 6.0
Between 45 and 54 10.0 ref. 6.0 ref.
More than 55 20.0 ** 8.0 ns
Locality
Paris region 17.5 ref. 9.0 ref
Provinces 7.0 ** 0.0 **
Working hours
Full time 13.0 ref. 8.0 ref.
Part time (<35 h) 0.5 ** 0.5 **
Family situation
Alone (single or divorced) 6.5 ns 5.0 ns
Company couple (with a company
employee)
11.0 ns 4.5 ns
Dual-earner couple (with an
external worker)
9.5 ref. 8.5 ref.
Breadwinner (with an inactive
spouse)
17.5 ** 0.0 ns
Number of dependent children
0 8.0 ref. 5.0 ref.
1 or 2 12.0 ns 5.5 ns
3 or more 18.0 * 16.0 ns
Notes: Signiﬁcant level: **: p < 0.01 *: p < 0.10 ns: non signiﬁcant. N = 534 executives
+ 4370 managers and professionals. In France. secondary school ends with
the Baccalauréat. a
Bac + 2 means a diploma obtained with 2 year of studies after it.
After the age of 45, on average, 12 per cent of men are in executive; 50 per cent if
they have graduated from the most prestigious Grandes écoles. This difference in
comparison to a Group 2 diploma (reference) is signiﬁcant in a logistic regression
model which controls the other variables.
Source: human resources database, November 2004.
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© 2007 The Author(s) Volume ** Number ** ** 2007
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Implicit requirements for career progression: the sacriﬁce of the
spouse’s career
The gendered foundations of career patterns also lie in the promotion of a
speciﬁc type of family conﬁguration — male breadwinner, inactive wife and
numerous children (see Table 3). This company does not tend to suppress
sexuality (Acker, 1990; Burrell, 1992) or domestic incursions but actually
encourages a certain form of sexual and family life — hetereosexuality and
marital status — even amongst employees. A certain number of managers
have indeed met their spouse in the company or have remarried another
employee after their divorce: 11 per cent are in a ‘company couple’ (9 per cent
for men, 15 per cent for women; see Table 4).5
In this case, the gendered
division of work in the family is reinforced by the subordination of women at
work as they often hold lower positions than their husband. Women are
clearly handicapped by the social representations attached to sexual roles and
household division of labour. Women are mainly perceived as housewives,
even if they are not. Sex roll spillover will affect women regardless of the
sexuality or whether or not they have children, and stereotypical attitudes
towards women predicated on women’s general lack of commitment to work
because of their families is a powerful process structuring gender hierarchies.
(Colgan and Ledwith, 1996, p. 34)
We can explain this emphasis on traditional division of sexual roles by
referring to the organizational culture (Morgan, 1986) of the company and
notably its paternalistic dimension. Beyond the underlying set of values that
associate women with domestic life and men with public life, gendered
relationships are embedded in a speciﬁc organizational culture that is the
product of history:
During my recruitment test [in 1977], my manager said: OK, but you both
(my husband and I) won’t be able to have a career, one of you will have to
choose, and it will be you inevitably. It was a really hard speech for a start
in the company! ... In the distribution department, the standard is the
inactive wife or better the schoolteacher (who can ask for a professional
transfer each time her husband is moving). Dinners with managers are
ridiculous, with the wives talking about their husband’s career, saying ‘We
had this position’ or ‘It’s outrageous, there is no curtain in his new ofﬁce.
(Woman, R3, 52, married, two children, graduate from a prestigious engineering
high school).
Created after World War II by the state in a context of strong union activism,
the company has developed an extensive internal social welfare providing
pension schemes and medical expenses coverage for employees and their
families. This paternalistic aspect of the company has been reinforced by
the sociological characteristics of the managers recruited — male engineers
with catholic backgrounds who had graduated from various grandes écoles
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Table4:Familysituationaccordingtojobposition
(%)
ExecutivesR1–R4HighpotentialManagersandprofessionals
TotalMenWomenMenWomenMenWomen
Single6.530.020.533.017.029.019.0
Companycouple9.016.07.011.09.015.011.0
Dual-earnercouple39.052.059.052.050.052.050.0
Breadwinner45.01.014.04.024.03.020.0
100.0100.0100.0100.0100.0100.0100.0
N56263.011673654022389592
Note:frequencymissing:54.
Source:humanresourcesdatabase,November2004.
ACCESS TO TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE WORK–LIFE BALANCE 11
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sometimes linked to the Army (notably the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique).
Moreover, the company’s organizational culture is also closely linked to technical
and productive constraints. The distribution of energy requires local
industrial sites, widely spread across the country. The company needs to
provide for all local management positions, even in remote places, while
organizing career development paths that include headquarters activities in
Paris. This need for geographical and functional mobility, associated with the
importance of institutional and social activities (taking part in — and organizing
— dinners and social events with local representatives and economic
elites), implicitly requires a certain kind of family conﬁguration and a division
of roles in the family. Most executives’ spouses are therefore inactive, acting
their role of ‘corporate wives’ (Kanter, 1977). When they work, they are
conﬁned to a narrow range of occupations with low pay and low authority
and they end up quitting their job after their husband’s second or third
professional transfer. In every case, male ‘successful managerial careers are
associated with extensive domestic support at home ... in the form of a wife’
(Wajcman, 1996, p. 619) and sometimes with social support in their relations
with colleagues or clients (Pahl and Pahl, 1971; de Singly and Chaland, 2002).
In any case, this model of a ‘two-person single career pattern’ (Papanek, 1973)
demands certain types of role performance from the wife which beneﬁt the
company without being rewarded or paid.
A masculine image of managers
Besides these informal norms of career, the difﬁculties of women to access
senior management positions is also to be found in the qualities and attributes
expected for fulﬁlling with justiﬁcation the role of ‘chef de centre’, that is,
plant manager (Guillaume and Pochic, 2007). Three types of abilities have to
be gathered in one person. First of all, a good manager has to demonstrate
technical abilities. Senior managers have spent the ﬁrst 10 years of their
career in technical and operational positions in the core departments of
the company, dealing with energy production or distribution. So access to a
higher level of management includes the preliminary ability to demonstrate
technical skills and understand industrial processes, even if only one-third of
the jobs actually require highly technical speciﬁcations.
Successful career paths also require leadership abilities and experience
outside Paris, handling large teams of employees and technicians (bluecollars
workers) in a difﬁcult social context. Unions are very powerful in local
sites and they have the ability to call for collective mobilization and strike,
sometimes taking illegal action and using methods of intimidation such as
conﬁning managers or abusing them verbally or physically. Last but not least,
managers have to show administrative ability. The very bureaucratic nature of
the working environment linked both to the state’s proximity but also to the
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hazardous type of industrial production, places a strong emphasis on rules
management.
If we can read images of masculinity in the dominant symbolism such as
the idea of a ‘tough and forceful leader’ and the emphasis put on charismatic
management style that contains an implicit exclusion of women (Wajcman,
1998), other aspects are less visible than in other organizations. For example,
aggressiveness, competition and meanness are not suitable for gaining a
position of power in the company. However, women seem to be penalized by
a socialization pattern that is quite distant from the individualistic, strategic,
unemotional and analytic approach that ﬁts the dominant culture. Moreover,
if very few women mention sexism or sexual harassment, some female
managers do not always feel at ease with the male dominant forms of sociability
(including content and style of communication, humour and jokes and
body language). As in many organizations, the status of women is undermined
by the numerical dominance of men and by the gendered distribution
of power. Because of their numerical weight but also their central role in
career promotion (Guillaume and Pochic, 2007), male managers play an active
role in the reproduction of a masculine symbolic order. Women are constrained
by the need to deal with the dominant culture, which means either
being trapped in ‘role encapsulation’ (ﬁtting pre-existing generalizations
about one’s category as a group), accepting isolation or becoming insiders by
turning against their own social category (Kanter, 1977).
Women’ strategies to shape their career routes
With such gendered foundations of career patterns, women executives often
recall their feeling of being atypical, particularly for the ﬁrst pioneers who
were a minority during the 1970s. To illuminate women’ difﬁculties in accessing
top management, we have distinguished their strategies towards two
main organizational norms related to the work–life balance: geographical
mobility and extensive availability.
Facing the forced geographical mobility norm
A few women managers have accepted the norm of forced geographical
mobility, more often when they were young, single and without children.
During their studies, they have sometimes experienced national or international
moves. Some of them had even lived these repeated moves when they
were young, being the daughter of a ‘spiralist’ manager, so they tend to
consider this mobility rule as normal and neutral. A few have clearly chosen
to remain single or childfree to be mobile at the beginning of their career.
This correlation between access to responsibilities and living alone can be
ACCESS TO TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE WORK–LIFE BALANCE 13
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Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
measured statistically, as 30 per cent of women executives live alone (single or
divorced), whereas this is only the case for 6 per cent of their male colleagues
(see Table 4). These results are conﬁrmed by national datasets on managers’
careers (Pochic, 2005). Life-stories revealed that repeated moves become more
and more difﬁcult to negotiate when women have children, even if their
husband is not leading an organizational career (such as a teacher, an expert
or self-employed). The alternation between Paris and the ‘provinces’ has
various consequences on work–life balance: in the Paris area more executive
jobs for the partner/spouse are concentrated, whereas living in a ‘province’
means a better quality of life (a more spacious home, less commuting). When
adapting to forced mobility, women managers usually build a speciﬁc
lifestyle, acting as a divorced couple with geographical splitting during the
week. As managers, they divide their subordinates in two groups: those who
accept the same private costs to run their career and those who refuse to do so,
but without looking at the inequality of their resources:
I know I’m quite atypical, because my husband has always followed me. He
likes to say that I should thank him for the career I made.... My husband is
a craftsman, a welder, he was working in the company when we met and
he had a taste for travel. After the birth of our ﬁrst child, he said: ‘If you
could move to the [French] West Indies, it would be nice, I would follow
you, I would take a sabbatical year’. Then I moved. He has followed me
every time since then. Each time, he creates his ﬁrm that he closes before
leaving and then he creates a new one somewhere else. It’s his choice, even
if it is not the most interesting option economically speaking, but.... It has
to do with his type of occupation: if I had married someone who had
graduated from a business school like me, I would have perhaps followed
him: who knows? (Woman, top manager R3, 45, married, three children,
graduate from a business school and has led a typical managerial career).
As many women managers and professionals are married to qualiﬁed work-
ers,6
we met also many ‘tied movers’ (Bielby and Bielby, 1992) who have
accepted following their husband once or more in France (or the French West
Indies7
or abroad) more recently. In opposition to the stereotypes on women’s
immobility, women who are married to another professional have entered
this company for its wide labour market with job security. But this geographical
mobility based on individual initiative is opposed to imposed mobility
practices and sometimes disturbs the three years’ rule in the same assignment.
Therefore, this tied geographical mobility means delays in career progression.
Women are forced to accept horizontal mobility at the ﬁrst stages of
their career (GF13 to GF13) and sometimes demotion at mid-career (GF18 to
GF17). This volunteered mobility is considered by their line manager as an
indicator of a family-orientation that can be detrimental to a successful career:
When they asked me to take another position in La Réunion for 4 years, my
14 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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husband decided to leave for a new job in Alençon [in metropolitan France].
He joined me 4 years ago and he was fed up, he wanted to have his own
career progression. As soon as my husband left, I was in a position of
demand towards the company. In that situation, you can’t negotiate
anymore. I asked my line manager to go toAlençon, and he said: ‘We will see
what we can ﬁnd for you’, but it was perceived as: ‘She wants to follow her
husband, you can’t have everything, she will have to take what is available.’
[...] These horizontal moves have cost me dearly, because now I must be the
lowest paid director of all the company! (Woman, R3, 46, married but
geographically separated for 8 years, two children, graduate from a small
engineering school and has experienced three GF 13 posts).
As geographical mobility is risky for career progression and for family
balance, many women managers choose to remain rooted in the Paris area, as
‘tied-stayers’ (Bielby and Bielby, 1992). These repeated refusals of mobility are
characteristic of women executives living in couples with another executive,
but it seems to become more common for the younger generations after
mid-career, for high potential women but also men (respectively 52 per cent
and 59 per cent are in a dual-earner couple, see Table 4). Despite the repeated
pressures of senior directors, these women have managed to climb the managerial
ladder in the Paris area, accepting in exchange long commuting hours
(home–work), numerous business trips (national or international) and even
uninteresting or rather humble assignments. This geographical stability
objectively reduces their chances to obtain managerial positions outside Paris,
because only 13 distribution units (out of over 100) are located in the Paris
area. Only a minority of women — and men — have succeeded in bypassing
this mobility norm, usually using their prestigious diploma and strong recommendations
(mentors).
Conversely, this stability makes the organization of childcare easier.
Women executives can delegate paid childcare and even children’s education
to the same selected professionals (such as nannies, baby-sitters, tutors) and
sometimes to grandparents. This fragile balance also requires ‘defensive strategies’
(Nicole-Drancourt, 1989) towards the career of their husband, who
must also refuse geographical mobility and sometimes accept lowering his
own career aspirations. This strategy seems easier to negotiate in feminine
departments and headquarter ofﬁces and more difﬁcult in the masculine and
technical departments spread all over the French territory. Life stories of
‘rooted’ top managers reveal that they have usually asserted this principle at
the beginning of their career, referring to family matters, and that they have
compensated for their ‘handicap’ by an intense functional mobility and an
extensive availability. As managers, they try to defend alternative career management
principles, based on negotiated time ﬂexibility and limited mobility
within one regional area:
With my husband, we didn’t want to manage the problem of two simultaACCESS
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neous careers, which is extremely difﬁcult, particularly at executive levels,
and we didn’t want to live separately during the week. It’s the only limitation
I insist on. And it has never been problematic for my career because
I have always been clear about that, they recruited me knowing it.... It
has only been problematic for my appointment to R4. The director who
received me began by giving me the usual lecture on mobility: ‘You see, the
direction of distribution has occupations located all over France, we can’t
afford to recruit people who are not mobile, etc.’. I answered: ‘I would be
very happy to become an assistant director, but if not being mobile is an
obstacle, I won’t. So if you want, I can save your time and leave now’. He
said: ‘Stay, we will see’. He grumbled and we began to discuss. After the
interview, he said: ‘I will take you on, but you can tell headquarters that you
are the last one. (Woman, R2, 48, married, two children, graduate from a
prestigious business school and made a career as expert in HR and
communication).
Facing the extensive availability norm
Besides the geographical mobility criterion, career promotion has always
been linked to time availability. There is ‘a belief that commitment is represented
by working full-time, — including being in early and staying on late;
that personal circumstances should not impinge upon work’ (Palmer, 1996, p.
140). More than any other categories, managers have always had a distinctive
relation to working time (Bouffartigue, 2001b; Laufer, 1998). This assumption
is reinforced by the obvious intensiﬁcation of managers’ working activities
(Karvar and Rouban, 2004) adding to the traditional norm of managerial
‘presence’. In this company, as in many others, men and women are now
obliged to conform to the male model of working life, even if they are not
equal in dealing with this time constraint. Three women’s strategies can be
reported.
The ﬁrst one implies following the rules of the career and slipping into the
long hours norm, while trying to respect the temporal horizon of the career
promotion (reach a GF19 position before the age of 40). For young women,
this pattern involves postponing maternity and getting established prior to
taking time off (maternity leave). Very widespread amongst single women,
women without children and a few married women senior managers, who
had to conform to the masculine career norms because there were very few of
them at the beginning of their career, this strategy requires delegating housework
to other women, even if female managers continue to organize and
manage these paying services, undertaking a great amount of the housework
themselves. This continuous presence at work is made possible because
women — and men — earn enough money to run a domestic company and
pay their different employees, such as a nanny and a cleaner. Besides, in
France, women do not have to choose between career and family as they have
16 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
access to different child-minding facilities — both run by the state and private
— and they receive tax incentives when they hire a nanny. This is also linked
to a certain ability to not feel guilty about the social norms associated with the
image of the ‘good mother’. As Table 3 shows, having three children increases
the probability of women to reach senior positions. But this unusual pattern
is not statistically signiﬁcant in itself (Model W) as it is often linked to a
double-career conﬁguration of two engineers who make use of huge external
domestic support. Most of the time, these women are very demanding with
their colleagues — male and female — and expect those who want a career to
make the same sacriﬁces. Overall, they do not favour diversity management,
either because it seems normal for them to adapt to this dominant pattern or
because they do not want to get preferential treatment that could undermine
their professional legitimacy. These women are usually not conscious of their
particular material situation, compared to non-qualiﬁed women (Blum and
Smith, 1988):
I can tell you a story. When I was pregnant with my second child, I told my
boss that I was pregnant and he took my work right away and gave it to my
colleagues. I was so upset that I did not take my maternity leave and I
worked until one week before I gave birth. I was in good shape so I said to
myself, ‘you (the boss) will look stupid, I will take it upon myself to handle
my work as usual’. I went to see my boss who did not want to sign for my
business trips because it was illegal, but I said to him that I would go in any
case, whether he signed or not. I did not want to reinforce the image that
when a woman is pregnant she is out of work for one year. I took only three
weeks off and then I was back at work. (Woman, top manager R1, 48,
divorced, two children, graduate from Ecole Polytechnique and has led a
typical managerial career).
The second and quite opposite strategy refers to claims of work–life reconciliation
and the preference given to family life, adjusting working time to
ﬁt with family constraints. This pattern is quite widespread among women
with young children, and implies a very strict control over working time
and the frequent use of chosen part-time work (Guillaume, 2006). This
family availability is easier to organize in position of expertise and headquarters
work. Many women top managers have experienced functional
activities, asking for part-time work for a few years, before returning to the
managerial career path. However, this close link between part-time opportunities
and expertise creates in return some sort of a vicious cycle (Pochic,
2004). If expertise positions are the only ones offering work–life balance
arrangements, even more women will choose these career patterns and get
stuck in them for the rest of their career. It is very difﬁcult for the company
to understand that this experience can be a short-term one and that women
can be ready to return to full-time work (and career promotion) after a
while. Using part-time is very detrimental to women’s careers because it
ACCESS TO TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE WORK–LIFE BALANCE 17
© 2007 The Author(s) Volume ** Number ** ** 2007
Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
infringes the double temporal dimension of daily long hours and fast
rhythm of functional and upward mobility. Women understand very
quickly that this ‘choice’ implies reaching a career ceiling that can be quite
deﬁnitive when opting for part-time work at the beginning of their career.
In this pattern many women experience guilt and a conﬂict of roles, and
some of them put their work at a distance and transfer their full commitment
to their family:
Yesterday, we had dinner with friends and they were ironic about the fact
that I could work part time because I am working in this company (that is
known to be family friendly). I said to them ‘you know, you have to be
brave to dare say: “I only work three days a week and at night I leave at
ﬁve” ’. It is always easier to stay at work than to leave. However, when you
arrive at 8 in the morning and you leave at 5, you put exactly the same day
as someone who arrives at 9:30 and leaves at 6:30, but it is not perceived the
same way. I do it and I keep my professional conscientiousness for myself.
(Woman, manager GF18, married with three children, graduate from a
business school, specialized in ﬁnance).
Beyond these two patterns, a third one, which can be seen as new and
innovative, is supported by women managers with children who want both a
career and a family life. Working full time and sharing/delegating housework,
they want a career with promotion prospects but they also want to
educate their children and spend time with them (not using their free time for
housework and domestic constraints). To combine these two aspirations they
partly rely on their husband who shares an egalitarian representation of
family responsibilities, but most of all, they try to promote ‘ﬂexible availability’
with a very efﬁcient organization of working time that is focused
on competence, performance and results. They try to accommodate their
working time to ﬁt into their children’s schedule — skipping lunchtime,
working at night or very early in the morning, using mobile IT tools and
optimizing business trips, while trying to deal with the time availability
requirements (long hours, few holidays and short maternity leave). As managers,
they try to convert their subordinates to this culture of performance in
order to diminish the working hours of their own department or service. This
very strict and planned organization of work can be seen as very innovative
and rather blunt in a working environment where sociability and networking
at work predominate. The interesting point in this pattern is the fact that it
appeals to more and more men who are now in a situation of dual-career
couples and have to share domestic responsibilities, taking their wife’s career
projects and constraints into consideration. Implicitly and above the innovative
individual arrangements, this strategy is probably representative of a
societal change where men and women are getting closer in the way they
want to run their work–family life.
18 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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A typology of strategies towards work–life balance
If we cross the three types of strategies regarding mobility and availability
constraints, we end up with seven career patterns. As we can see in the
Table 5, the acceptance of forced mobility is always linked to extensive
availability, giving shape to the ‘spiralist’ career model inherited from the
past. The fact that there is no other time-management option in this conﬁguration
reveals a strong career orientation and the acceptance of its costs. If we
switch to men and women with mobility constraints (rooted career), the table
shows that they can opt either for an extensive availability to compensate
their immobility (compensation model), build on their family constraints to
promote work–life reconciliation (a family-oriented model) or try to promote
a more ﬂexible availability (alternative model). Finally, men and women
managers living with a manager also have three options: they can try to lead
two symmetrical careers at once, trying to move together and showing their
commitment by putting in long hours at work (double-career model); they
can manage their two careers alternatively (alternate model, knowing that
women are more likely to accept a momentary disruption of their career for
their husband’s beneﬁt); or they can again opt for work–life reconciliation
knowing that their career will suffer (a family-oriented model).
Conclusion
Can we now conclude that women managers are promoting an alternative
career model (Méda, 2002)? A few of them have slipped into the ‘spiralist’
Table 5: Typology of strategies towards work–life balance
Availability
(mobility)
Extensive
availability
Flexible
availability
Work–life
reconciliation
Acceptance
of forced
mobility
Spiralist model
(breadwinner or
single)
X X
Rooted
career
Compensation
model (women top
managers high
potential men)
Alternative model
(women managers
high potential
mothers)
Family-oriented
model (women
expert or project
leader)
Tied
movers
Double-career
model (high ﬂyers’
couple)
Alternate career
model (high
potential mothers)
Family-oriented
model (women
expert or project
leader)
ACCESS TO TOP MANAGEMENT AND THE WORK–LIFE BALANCE 19
© 2007 The Author(s) Volume ** Number ** ** 2007
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pattern, notably the pioneers (mainly engineers) who paid the price for their
career orientation, usually being single, childless or divorced. However,
many female managers in dual-career couples are not consistent with this
organizational model, either following their husbands’ career moves or
remaining rooted in a speciﬁc area. This resistance to forced geographical
mobility is obviously being progressively accepted by the organizational
system, as many young high ﬂying men are now in a dual-career couple.
However, extensive availability remains a sign of distinction in the company.
Putting in long hours at work is more than ever a means for being detected
and selected from among people with very similar (excellent) proﬁles in an
organizational context that is not results-orientated. Even if many young
female managers with children are claiming work–life reconciliation, they are
being channelled in ‘female areas with few opportunities’ (Crompton and
Lefeuvre, 1992). Their family-orientation is interpreted by their line managers
as a self-limitation and their explicit withdrawal from the competition for
power. A few women executives and many young mothers are trying to
defend an alternative model, described as ‘ﬂexible availability’. Promoting
management based more on results than on excessive attendance, these
women managers are often pictured as not very diplomatic, rough, direct,
and very remote from the stereotypes of the éternel féminin (participating in
dialogue, consensus, delegation and so on).
If we look at the structure of opportunity and the ongoing changes in the
company — its privatization and internationalization processes — we can
see opportunities for women. The labour market will probably be more
open to new (female) core skills such as ﬁnance, business law, marketing
and sales. However, the centrality of industrial risks and infrastructure
management (storage, transportation and distribution) will surely maintain,
or even reinforce, the predominance of the engineering diploma as a key to
access responsibilities. The recent internationalization of the company can
also shift the glass ceiling to international assignments (Forster, 1999). An
international experience in a subsidiary might become the new ‘regional’
experience required for career promotion. Along with time availability,
mobility requirements will remain the key factor for career promotion.8
If
proportions really matter (Kanter, 1977), we can not expect a minority of
women who are able to ﬁt in the mobile and fully dedicated manager stereotype
to reverse the self-perpetuating processes generated by tokenism,
social similarity and peer attraction. Above all, there are two major limitations
to this belief in balancing numbers: the persistent inequality in family
responsibilities that constrain women’s involvement at work, and the patriarchal
nature of organizational structures that implies that men dominate
not only as managers but also as men (Ressner, 1987). In this context, we
believe that both individual resistances (women’s strategies) and collective
action (the modiﬁcation of formal procedures through collective bargaining)
will show their limits.
20 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION
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Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Notes
1. Since 2000 a network of French researchers in sociology, organizational studies
and history has developed research on the evolution of the speciﬁc category of
‘cadres’ — salaried managers and professionals — in a context of major social and
economic transformations: growing numbers, feminization, the instability of
careers, the increase of experts and so on. For more details, see gdr Cadres (n.d.).
2. We were not able to obtain the same data for the employees of the foreign or
French subsidiary companies.
3. Every occupation is weighted and put in classiﬁcation scale from GF1 to GF11 (for
the less qualiﬁed employees until the ﬁrst levels of supervision), from GF12 to
GF19 (for the qualiﬁed workers the cadres, a speciﬁc French category that includes
managers and professionals) and from R4 to R1 for top managers. Wages are
closely linked to these functional groups, apart from the executive positions.
4. For more details on high potential HR policies in France, see Falcoz, 2002.
5. Far from being rare this reality is clearly accounted in the HR database, where
spouses are divided up into three categories: inactive, working in the company,
working outside the company.
6. In France in 2002, 48% of women managers are in a dual-career couple (with
another manager or professional), which is the case of only 24 per cent of men
managers (Pochic, 2005).
7. This company has distribution units in the French West Indies, (Guadeloupe and
Martinique) and La Réunion.
8. These two criteria had clearly been addressed in the ‘equal opportunity act’ signed
in July 2004. Despite the fact that the only quantitative objectives were set on
wage-gap compensation measures, the agreement also contained recommendations
linked to women’s access to executive positions. These advices were speciﬁcally
related to work–life balance: geographical mobility should not remain a
condition for promotion and a choice to work part time should not be an obstacle
to managerial careers.
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