In the current extremely competitive and dynamic business world, women make up half of the workforce. According to Shin (2013), women have been getting into the managerial ranks and professional ranks of US corporations almost the same rate as men for more than a quarter a century. In addition, women are said to play a very vital responsibility in the growth of the economy in the US. However, it has widely become a common phenomenon that most women rarely make it to the upper management and executive positions in many fortune 500 companies. The situation is compounded by various leadership culture and organizational gaps that prohibits women from advancing to upper management caused by wide forces and policies in the society and various systematic barriers have prohibited women from advancing to upper management positions.

One of the leadership culture and organizational gap that prohibits women from advancing to upper management positions in fortune 500 companies is wide forces and policies in the society that perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions that represent current challenges to women in various leadership roles . There are various policies and legislation that are related to employment equality, access to reproductive rights and affordable day care, and human rights have had profound effects on the enhancing the capacity of women to advance to upper management positions in their workplace (Johns, 2014). In addition, the media is responsible for driving a social norm that propagates gender stereotypes by the use of images that reinforce leadership notions and commonly presenting their male counterparts in their various fortune 500 companies as “experts”. The images presented by the media show women as being at home and younger than men, hence, communicating and reinforcing perceptions among the people as female are unsuitable and incompetent for leadership positions. Moreover, pervasive stereotypes also portray women as lacking the right skills to lead and manage especially in a male-dominated business environment.

While various fortune 500 companies have made attempts to change the select work environments of the previous era, various systematic barriers have prohibited women from advancing to upper management positions. One of them is the high performance standards as well as risky tasks assigned to women (Shin, 2013). It is common to find that when women get promoted to upper management positions, they are typically held to high standards of performance than their male counterparts. In addition, they are tasked with challenging responsibilities that are associated with great possibility of failure. In some cases, women are less likely to be provided with developmental opportunities and “stretch” assignments, both of which are important to getting promotional opportunities (Cleveland, 2000).

Secondly, the perception of work-family conflict plays a significant role in prohibiting women from advancing to upper management positions in fortune 500 companies (Hennessy, 2007). There is a belief that if women make a decision of advancing to upper management roles and are willing to perform their duties as CEO and handle their family at the same time, evaluators may not give them a change to be promoted because of their own work-family conflict perceptions that women go through (Hammer, 2003). Another organizational culture that increases the gap is bad human resources practices whereby women are commonly underprivileged in terms of prospects for mentoring and networking. According to the research done by Diversity Institute and Catalyst, more than 60 percent have a feeling getting a promotions depends on “who you know” rather than “what you know”.

In a nutshell, investigation on the leadership cultural and organization gap that prohibits women from advancing to upper management in fortune 500 companies is caused by wide forces and policies in the society and various systematic barriers have prohibited women from advancing to upper management positions. The wide forces and policies in the society perpetuate stereotypes and assumptions that represent current challenges to women in various leadership roles. Systematic barriers have prohibiting women include high performance standards as well as risky tasks and perception of work-family conflict.