Extending the Labyrinth beyond Pathways to Leadership: Navigating the Challenges of Women's Careers

“A labyrinth conveys the complexity and variety of challenges that can appear along the way [to a distinguished career]. Passage through a labyrinth requires persistence, awareness of one’s progress, and a careful analysis of the puzzles that lie ahead. Routes to the center exist but are full of twists and turns, both expected and unexpected.” ~ Alice Eagly & Linda Carli In 2007, Eagly and Carli published “Through the Labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders,” discussing the challenges to women in leadership. In this highly impactful work, they proposed a labyrinth as an apt metaphor for the complexities women women’s face in navigating a pathway to leadership. Beyond recognizing the existence of a glass ceiling, they described the myriad challenges experienced by women seeking and occupying leadership roles. Though this work was published nearly two decades ago, we continue to see relatively little progress in terms of women occupying top positions in corporate America. In May 2020, just 37 (7.4%) of Fortune 500 CEOs were women (Hinchliffe, 2020), and as of September 2020, only 32 (6.4%) of S&P 500 CEOs were women (Catalyst, 2020). On corporate boards, women comprise 22.5% of Fortune 500 corporate board directors (Alliance for Board Diversity & Deloitte, 2018), and although this figure is higher than the percentages of female CEOs, it still shows that women constitute a clear minority of female leaders. Whilst these statistics point to the labyrinth of challenges that women experience in navigating paths to top leadership roles, all working women experience complex and nuanced stereotypes, preferences, expectations, and treatment that also take on labyrinth-like qualities. With this in mind, we align with the labyrinth metaphor of Eagly and Carli (2007) to present a set of studies that extends beyond a labyrinth of leadership, to the labyrinth of women’s work more broadly defined. In this symposium, we elaborate upon additional twists and turns in the labyrinth of working women’s experiences. Collectively, the research presented explores individual, relational, and organizational factors influencing the experience of working women. In particular, the collection of studies provide novel insights including: (1) negative evaluations of organizations have a greater effect than positive evaluations in increasing the gender diversity of boards; (2) although women are perceived to be less powerful than men, those who balance agentic and communal behaviors are perceived as more effective leaders, not higher in status; (3) although diversity and inclusion are often used synonymously, organizations need to do both to decrease isolation among minority groups; (4) women value and seek meaningful work more than men which may affect job choices; and (5) though women experience more mistreatment in the workplace than men, the attributions for, and identity implications of, mistreatment may differ depending on the gender composition of the organizational context and the gender of the perpetrator. Taken together, these studies shed light on how women experience and navigate careers, others’ perceptions of their qualities, work environments, work values, and interpersonal relationships with others at work.