Women in Management A Strategy for Sustainable Development in Nigeria

Abstract

Career interruptions are plateauing and turnover is expensive. The money corporations invest in recruitment, training and development is less likely to produce top executives among women that among men. The invaluable company experience that developing executives acquire at every level as they move up through management ranks are more often lost.

Demographic realities are going to force corporations across the country to analyze the cost of employing women in managerial positions and what they will discover is that women cost more (Schwartz, 2005).

Women in management and bringing women into management have been subjects of increasing significance and concerns for all. The areas where a properly structured program would help companies achieve their goal of increasing number of women executives and maximizing their effectiveness are becoming more significant. With this in mind the Stanford Business School sponsored a conference in April, 1974 on women in management. Business leaders from across United States of America attended. The success of the conference and the presentations were developed into a Book for permanent availability and a wider distribution (Miller, 1975)

It has been observed that women are better bosses than men (Sappenfield and Day, 2001). In an architectural firm of Dimilla Shaffer in Boston, all the members of the team were women and when they met everyone took part. They organized, parceled out responsibilities, and devised ways to check off tasks as the job progressed. While in a firm led by a male, things were different. Sitting at a granite table in a meeting room overlooking Boston, Harbor, the project was a study in frustration. Every one would just sit around the table and watch with their little calendars. There was no receptivity to group planning. It is a telling comparison, and it came at a time when more and more evidence suggested that women made better managers than men (Sappenfield and Day, 2001).

For years companies wanted leaders who took control, people who rumbled through boardrooms like panter tanks, achieving their goal no matter the odds or obstacles. Business was a war game and men were seen as the best commanders. Today two decades after the great wave of layoffs in the United State of America turned many workers into free agents with little corporate loyalty, businesses want team builders and communicators, people who create relationship with employees and instill in them a commitment to the organization. Studies have repeatedly shown that these mean women (Sappenfield and Day, 2001)

Economic growth entails an increase in the national output for a period of one year from a particular year using a previous year as the base year (Iyoha, 2006). It entails also an increase in the national income measured in terms of Gross National Product, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income and Gross Personal Income. If economic growth is backed by the distribution of the proceeds of growth in such a way that there is a structural change that leads to an improvement in the economic well being of the masses of the people, economic development sets in. Economic Development is one of the four pillars of sustainable development, the others being social development, environmental development and cultural diversity.

The specific objectives of this study is to a theoretical review of the institutional barriers of what keeps women out of the executive suite to do a theoretical review of Sustainable Development, and o do a theoretical analysis to show how the process of women in management could be a strategy for Sustainable development in Nigeria and to design a system cybernetic model of 8 inputs, transform of the process of women in management and output of the increase in sustainable development in Nigeria. All the objectives were achieved in this study.