Leadership Perception of Women in Service Industry

Abstract

Women make up almost half of the world’s population. Despite this, the rate of
women’s participation in business life has not reached the same levels. Recently, the number of
female employees has increased significantly, especially in areas such as customer relations, public
relations, advertising, human resources, finance and informatics. However, the number of women
decreases as they reach the top management levels. Women face many difficulties in business life.
These difficulties increase in the process of their promotion to managerial positions. This study
tries to determine the expectations and leadership perceptions of female managers operating in
the service industry. The method used in this context is the phenomenology research method of
the qualitative analysis method. Within the scope of the study, 13 questions were prepared by the
researcher and asked to the participants with the interview technique. According to female managers,
leaders are those who can take more responsibility, take more risks, have more responsibility and
are more effective in decision making. In addition, female managers are most often faced with
gender discrimination in leadership processes. Due to their emotional nature, female managers
have problems both in their management processes and in their relations with their employees. In
addition, female managers have a lot of responsibilities, especially due to their motherhood duties,
and this affects their management negatively. However, female managers emphasize that women can
develop different perspectives on problems in businesses with their emotionality. In environments
where women are present, communication is more formal and relationships are established more
successfully due to women’s empathy. Despite this, female managers have difficulty in getting male
managers to accept themselves. In this process of making it accepted, female managers may encounter
events such as mobbing. Social roles and perceptions towards women, such as motherhood, lead
to results in women’s discouragement, men being eligible for higher positions, prejudice against
women, women’s inability to be managers because of their roles, and women’s feeling of having to
prove themselves