(Illustration by Ben Wiseman)
In 2004, the International Labour Office released a 71-page document called “Breaking the Glass Ceiling.” It carried the subtitle “Women in Management” and concluded that, in fact, there weren’t very many women who fit that description. “The rule of thumb is still: the higher up an organization’s hierarchy, the fewer the women,” the report asserted. But most of the data in that report came from the for-profit sector. So a team of researchers decided to find out if the persistence of gender inequality in management was equally strong in the nonprofit sector. The researchers built their study around one nonprofit—the Dutch division of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF Holland, the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders), an organization that provides medical aid to people in places of crisis.
According to Liesbet Heyse, an assistant professor in organization sociology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, MSF Holland serves as a “critical case” for studying gender equality (or lack thereof) in nonprofit management. MSF Holland, in other words, has several characteristics that should make it an especially promising environment for advancing the “women in management” cause. First, as a humanitarian organization, MSF Holland presumably adheres to a social mission that encompasses gender equality. Second, it has low pay levels, and that factor tends to correlate with higher percentages of women in management. (Upper-level jobs at MSF Holland “are not very status-oriented,” Heyse says. “You don’t do them for the big bucks.”) And third, because of the nature of its work, MSF Holland will tend to attract women who don’t aim to start a family. As a result, it should include large numbers of women who are strong candidates for managerial roles. In sum, if gender inequality in promotion to management exists at MSF Holland, then chances are high that it’s endemic to the nonprofit sector.
Heyse and her colleagues analyzed MSF Holland’s personnel database for the years 2003 to 2008. The database featured extensive information about the age, gender, nationality, period of employment, location of employment, and intra-organizational career trajectories and promotions of more than 2,200 employees. The research team found that—even when it controlled for factors like age, nationality, and previous work experience—women at MSF Holland made a slower transition to management than their male counterparts. But when the team controlled for occupational category, it found that the effect of gender was no longer statistically significant. “It was not gender per se that made [women] move more slowly into management positions,” says Heyse. Instead, she explains, the factor that was most likely to determine women’s chances of advancement was their choice of occupation.
The researchers divided employees into three occupational categories: medical doctors, other medical staff members (such as nurses and midwives), and nonmedical staff members (such as financial controllers and logisticians). Overall, women made up 55 percent of the medical doctors, 80 percent of the other medical staff, and 34 percent of the nonmedical staff. Both the female-dominated “other medical” group and the male-dominated “nonmedical” group boasted faster promotion rates than the mixed-gender “medical doctors” group—but the nonmedical group had the fastest overall promotion rate. (That pattern held true regardless of the gender of individual employees.) In other words, the occupational group that featured the best opportunities for promotion was also the group that featured the lowest proportion of women.
Carrie Oelberger, an assistant professor of nonprofit and public management and leadership at the University of Minnesota, notes that the work of Heyse and her colleagues generally supports the conclusion that occupational segregation by gender persists in the nonprofit sector. But Oelberger disagrees with the contention that MSF Holland represents a “critical case” for studying gender disparity in the managerial ranks of nonprofit organizations. She disputes, in particular, the suggestion that an international aid organization like MSF Holland will necessarily have more gender-neutral promotion practices than other nonprofits. “My work studying [human resources] in international aid organizations, especially large ones, has shown that organizations often have policies that run contrary to their expressed missions,” she says.
Marleen Damman, Liesbet Heyse, and Melinda Mills, “Gender, Occupation, and Promotion to Management in the Nonprofit Sector: The Critical Case of Médecins Sans Frontières Holland” Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 25, 2014.
Read more stories by Adrienne Day.