Hinderbanan - en studie om jämställdhetsarbete och kvinnors förutsättningar inom professionella tjänsteföretag
Although women express a desire to be managers and although they constitute the majority of Sweden's newly graduated academics, they are still heavily underrepresented on senior management level in the Swedish private sector, where men hold as much as 95 % of the top positions. Considering the massive waste of resources that this implies, this thesis sets out to investigate the underlying reasons for the skewed gender distribution on senior management level in two Swedish professional services companies - an industry where the described problem has been palpable. Additionally, the thesis explores the effects of actively working for increased gender equality. With a basis in gender and organization theory, a broad theoretical framework has been compiled and applied to a qualitative case study design. The thesis reveals seven distinct impediments, which together create a parable of an obstacles course, that prevent women from advancing the corporate ladder in the same manner as their male colleagues. The impediments include aspects of organization structure, a fundamental presupposition of the male norm being superior and a male tendency to select other men. Furthermore, the results yield two categories of interventions that positively impact women's conditions in organizations: direct and indirect measures. In the parable, the two measures are compared to providing women with ladders to overcome the impediments (direct) as opposed to actually demolishing the obstacles to the ground (indirect). Finally, the thesis implies that it is important to acknowledge the occurrence of structural gender discrimination and to actively work to overcome it, with a combination of direct and indirect measures.