Human Capital: Leadership Explanations

Human Capital
The leadership labyrinth has some explanations that discuss the possible causes why women are not occupying a consider number in top leadership positions, being one of them, the fact that women have less Human Capital investment in education, training, and work experience than men.
However, the education part of Human Capital is changing and not being anymore a reasonable explanation to the labyrinth. As time goes, women are getting more undergraduate, professional, and doctorate degrees than men, even though they still not reaching top leadership positions as easily as men do. It is noticed that, nowadays, to be in a manager position it is almost a requirement to have some degree. So, as women are getting more degrees, this

difference between men and women should be decreasing, which is not happening yet.
As is perceived in the statement made by Patty Barcenas, one of the women leaders interviewed: “I had high hopes to someday be a director of the Facilities but since I have been there, there is no opportunity for a women to do this even though I have more education than my boss.”
Continuing the explanations, in general, women do have less work experience than men. The main reason for this is that women take more responsibility for domestic duties, giving up their careers. There is evidence that, indeed, women quit jobs for family reasons more often than men.
Although men's participation in domestic labor has increased, women continue to have more responsibilities with child care and household chores, and it is not ease to arrange the work and home life. So each women respond to these work-home conflict in a different way. Some of them need to choose between the leadership track and the mommy track, because they cannot deal successfully with both. But many of them try to excel in both, and they can actually succeed in every role.
Also women have fewer developmental opportunities at work than do men. Most of this lack of developmental opportunities are driven by prejudice. As was already discussed above, usually women are not involved largely in top leadership positions. According Northouse (2013), most of the women in leader positions are in the fields of accounting, education, and HR. One of the barriers in the developmental opportunities for women is that they do not use to self-promote and have difficulty establishing mentor relationships. On the other hand men do use to promote themselves, which help them to grow easily in their careers and reach top leadership positions.