"Women Managers and Their Personal Barriers for Upward Mobility in Private and Public Sectors"

Abstract

Women’s participation in the paid workforce is one of the most significant social changes of the last century. Therefore, significant progress has been achieved by women with their increase movements into the occupations and the proportion of women in management of different levels of the organizations has increased. However, towards the end of year 2012 the proportion of women in decision making is very low and still there are only around 20 per cent women are represent the managerial positions. Qualitative case study methodology was used to answer the question ‘what are the perceived personal barriers that inhibit to career development of women managers in Sri Lanka’? By this study, it has been analyzed the experiences of 40 Sri Lankan women who are holding senior-level management positions in five public and five private sector organizations in the occupational categories of Education, Accountancy, Engineering, Insurance, Banking and Medical Service. The Grounded Theory analysis method was applied to analyze the data. The study found out that there are barriers in organizational support, number of task and working load, nearest colleagues and friendship and fellow managers and support.