Management development for women

Abstract

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in the provision of management development opportunities for women. The A.T.M. has run a one-day seminar on the topic (see Chambers, 1979) and has established a Special Interest Group. A number of experiments have also been pioneered in the provision of extended women-only management courses, for example, at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (see Langrish, 1980a) and through the West Midlands Engineering Employers Association. In this paper I want to explore some of the issues raised by this subject, and try to put these in the context of some current ideas about management development in general. I also want to argue that men are affected by the subject as well as women, although in different ways. Most management trainers are men (90% of ATM’s membership is male) and we have to decide what response to make to the issues raised by women: we cannot avoid a response because to do nothing is in itself a response.