Bridging the Gap Between Gender and Leadership: Exploring the Real - Explicit and Implicit - Reasons Behind the Absence of Women on the 2014-2015 MUS Executive Council

McGill Women in Leadership (MWIL), Deautels Women in Business (DWIB), TEDxMontreal Women, the National Women in Business Conference, the Intercollegiate Business Convention. Evidently, as the non-exhaustive list above demonstrates, there are many occasions for women at McGill to thrive and shine in the area of leadership, where they are chronically and critically underrepresented. Within Bronfman, and McGill as a whole, women apply to volunteer, speak, participate, and join a host of clubs and initiatives highlighting female leaders. This just serves to show that, here at McGill, go-getters surround us, and females are no exception.
Curiously enough, in the past four years, the number of women on the MUS Executive Council has steadily decreased. This shift has culminated in this year’s council where there are absolutely no women leading our undergraduate society. That means, in a faculty where 51.2 percent of its 2,344 students are female, there’s not a single woman to “act as the primary contact point for all members of the MUS,” as per the the Society’s Constitution.
... In an attempt to uncover the processes that ostensibly inhibit the full participation of women in the modern workforce, Patricia Hewlin, one of the panelists and a professor in the faculty's Organizational Behaviour department, bodly stated that "young women pull themselves back from opportunities" before their careers have even started. She then went on to clarify that women are socially conditioned to restrict themselves from pursuing certain career oppotunities, as tehy are constantly "thinking about the impact [of their decisions] on their potential family."
... This thought was later echoed by another professor, Brian Rubineau, who pointed out studies which have demonstrated that “women disproportionately self-select” themselves as being ill-suited for work in certain fields solely on the basis of gendered preconceptions. This “self-selection”, according to Rubineau, is principally the result of both implicit and explicit messages in media, as well as in the social circles of many female young professionals.

Read full article here: The Bull and Bear, January 2015