15% of women sleep with their bosses and 37% get promoted
Research from Center for Work-Life Policy published by business insider shows that among director level/professional women 15 percent sleep with their bosses and 37 percent get rewarded for it with a promotion or some form of career progression.
The CWLP study also found that 34 percent of women know another woman who has had an affair with a boss. Now sex in the workplace is nothing new, but the link between sex and career progression needs more examination. Do women really feel it is necessary to sleep with their bosses to break through the glass ceiling? Or are there other factors at play?
Business Insider contends that women “need powerful, senior executives to help promote them to the next level of management.” Not being a woman in a senior position, I’m unable to comment on this from personal experience, but the statistics in Maureen Frank’s feature article on the glass ceiling earlier this week don’t lie.
“There is also a marked gender gap when it comes to leadership. Women currently make up 45.4 percent of the workforce, yet two percent of Chairs in the ASX200 are women, 8.3 percent of Board Directors in ASX200 are women and only 10.7 percent of Executive Managers in the ASX are women.”
So yes, women need powerful senior executives to get ahead in the workplace, their number of men in executive management is overwhelming, but does this force women to sleep with their bosses as the only way to get ahead in the workplace?
Have you encountered this in the workplace? Is this a problem that needs to be addressed? Or is using sex to get ahead (or using your position of power to get staff to sleep with you) in the workplace fair game?
What I find interesting about this article isn’t that women sleep with their bosses (nothing new there). It’s that the author immediately assumes that this is the result of men exploiting junior female executives rather than the women exploiting their bosses to get ahead (because that’s never happened right?). Or perhaps it’s simply because men with power and wealth are more likely to be selected as a mate by women, regardless of whether they work together.