Introduction

This chapter takes up the issues facing women with the skills and qualifications to progress to the most senior levels in the labour market. Research by employers and academics shows that women are very poorly represented in the boardroom and in senior management teams, despite over three decades of legislation and policy interventions on their behalf. Herein lies the puzzle. Do women themselves lack commitment to their jobs and to earning their own money, and are they uncomfortable wielding power, as some have suggested? Or are structural explanations, and the indirect discrimination found in workplace cultures and processes of advancement, more compelling explanations? To explore these issues, we discuss the experiences of qualified women in the local authority sector, a sector that has been in the vanguard of the development of family-friendly and equal opportunities policies. All the women whose experiences we discuss here had attained jobs that were judged to have promotion prospects, earning upwards of £18,000 pa in 2005.

The GELLM study discussed here was concerned with women's advancement within the workplace (Bennett et al, 2006a). It focused on women with educational qualifications who were in jobs, paid above the national average, with career development potential. Women's work–life preferences and their perception of the choices they had to make to achieve these preferences were at the heart of the investigation. Data were collected about their aspirations and attitudes towards their current career, the value they attached to employment, and to their own job in particular, and their perceptions of the opportunities and challenges facing them when considering applying for promotion within their organisation.

As described elsewhere, the policy agendas of the local authorities involved in this study fed into and guided the research design (Bennett, 2008). Four local authorities chose to examine women's career progression within their own organisations and gave the team access both to their employees and to their workforce data. The research design, carried out in the same way in each participating local authority, incorporated both quantitative and qualitative research methods (described in Appendix A).

The study discussed here is based on 1,370 structured questionnaire responses from female employees in these four organisations and focus group discussions with 106 of these same women, grouped according to their age, caring responsibilities and career stage.