Abstract:
In recent decades a widening of access of women to the employment has been
recorded. However, the participation of women in decision-making at various levels in
the public sector organizations is very low and the women in the highest management
levels have increased only by twenty per cent. Therefore, this exploratory study locates
women managers within the context of gender relations and managerial ideology in Sri
Lanka. Further, an attempt has been made to identify how they have become dialectical
in the arena of management. The questions to be answered in this research are: 1) How
managerial positions in Sri Lanka’s public sector are distributed across male and
female? 2) Are Sri Lankan public sector women managers distinctive in their managerial
style? 3) How these managers have become dialectical with organizations in the process
of acceding to top positions? and 4) How these managers have become dialectical with
the family context in preserving such positions?
This study, analyzes the experiences of twenty five Sri Lankan women who were
holding senior-level management positions in five public sector organizations in the
occupational categories of Education, Accountancy, Engineering, Medical Service, and
Sri Lanka Administrative Service. In carrying out this study mainly the interpretive
qualitative methodology and the feminist research approach have been adopted. The
findings of this study reveal that Sri Lankan women have a non-traditional management
style and they successfully manage the work-family interface. Accordingly, the majority
of the married women managers lead successful marriage life. However, these women
managers have pointed out two reasons as main dialectical with their organizations.
They are stereotypical and traditional attitudes, employer’s ignorance and lack of
enforcement of the regulations. According to this study, women still encounter obstacles
to their advancement and the organizational constraints have thoroughly affected to the
sex segregation in the managerial positions in their organizations. The sex segregation
index value has been gradually increased in the last decade. This reveals that the job
opportunities are not being equally distributed among males and females. Therefore, the
policies and programmes have to be focused to promote equitable gender relations and
division of labour within the household and the organization.
