Woman and Management: A Conceptual Review, with a Focus on Muslim Women in Management Roles in Western and in Muslim-Majority Countries

We consider the roles of Muslim women managers, executives and profes-sionals in three ways: as women qua women; as women of the Muslim diaspora in Western countries; and as women in Muslim Majority Cultures (MMCs). In reviewing the literature on the “glass ceiling” which prevents women achieving parity with men in middle and senior management roles, we are impressed by the work of Helgeson and Johnson on the special qualities of women in management roles, and compare their social psychological model with accounts of “strong” Muslim women who, drawing on Islamic traditions have performed many leadership roles outside of the traditional family. Nevertheless, it is Muslim women’s strength as strong family managers, with men being supporters rather than leaders of such family roles, which we generalise in describing an ideal model of a Muslim women manager. We draw too on traditional Islamic models in describing the kind of capitalist enterprise which may thrive in MMCs, and in which women will play leading roles. Nevertheless, we observe that in many MMCs non-Muslim (but strong) traditions of patriarchy often prevail, and subvert women’s search for higher education and leadership roles. This review advocates reforms in MMCs which will allow women to enter the world of employment, and to rise to higher managerial positions. At the same time, we observe the strong prejudices against Muslim women entering managerial positions in Western cultures, based on multiple, intersecting prejudice and discrimination against women; against visible ethnic minorities; and against those


Introduction
The authors of this paper have two major concerns. The first is the discrimination against Muslim women by employers in Western nations (those countries in whom the majority of the population are of European heritage). Our second concern, as Muslims, is the discrimination against women as managers and as professionals, in Muslim Majority Cultures (MMCs)-the Muslim cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and Southern Asia. We cannot address these two concerns without first considering the range of factors which can impede women (of whatever ethnicity or religion) from reaching management roles at a variety of levels, in the companies in Western nations which choose to employ them. We shall argue that the identified strengths of women managers in Western countries may also apply, in a culturally modified way, to Muslim women seeking occupational advancement in MMCs.

Women in Management: "Western" Studies
The barriers to women's progress in taking management roles in Muslim countries such as Palestine, Jordan and Bangladesh may first of all, be similar in a number of ways to the issues facing women in Western countries, and especially minority women who seek to attain status in managerial roles (Rizzo, Abdel-Latif & Maeyer, 2007) [2]. The study of women in management roles, and the barriers to such attainment in Western countries has recent genesis (Alvesson & Billing, 1999) [3]. It remains clear that in all countries of the world there remains a "glass ceiling" (of variable height and thickness) which prevents women attaining the highest ranks in business organisations-when they do succeed, it is often in specialised roles such as human relations management, or  (Paludi, 2013) [4].
An ILO (2015) study [5], updating World Bank (2012) [6] profiles of women in management, surveyed 108 countries and reported significant advances in the proportions of women in middle and senior management roles. While women outnumbered men in the areas of human relations, publicity and communications, they were underrepresented in fields such as sales, marketing and higher management. The ILO study identified many different ways in which women said that they could advance their careers, including peer support and mentoring, and the pressure for adequate Work Life Balance (WLB) benefits. Certain nations had not made progress in women's role advancement however, and the eleven nations ranked lowest by ILO were all Muslim-majority cultures, many of them bracketed as "low to middle income" countries. Only Turkey and Palestine ranked with "developed" nations in the proportions of women in the more senior managerial roles.
In 2016 women occupied 24 percent of senior roles in the North American Fortune 500 companies, an increase of 3 percent since 2011. But in 2016, in 33 percent of global companies there were no women in senior management. The authors of the report reaching these conclusions commented: "The percentage of women in senior roles is slowly growing worldwide, but at this pace we won't reach parity for decades." (Catalyst, 2017) [7]. In a British analysis Francke (2014) [8] pointed to "the power of role models"-the prominence and activism of powerful women in British institutions and companies who are exemplars of how success may be achieved. In fact, this report shows that knowledge of discrimination, potential or actual, can make women grudgingly accept rather low levels of achievement in organisations.
Carter & Silva (2010) [9] observing that only three percent of Fortune 500 companies were headed by a female CEO, report on a follow-up study of cohorts of male and female MBA graduates in America, and showed that after graduating women were significantly more likely to be appointed to positions of lower rank and salary than their male counterparts. But an early appointment to a lower ranked or rewarded managerial post tended to determine a woman's whole career pattern-a similar finding to that of Metcalfe (2010) [10] in her research on a number of Muslim-majority cultures. Women who did not take "child-care breaks" remained disadvantaged in American organisations. In this analysis, all too often women managers were seen as "taking care", while male managers were viewed (by the senior males who hired them) as "taking charge", and were the likely candidates for further promotion. However, we argue below for a Muslim-model in which the "caring" role of being a strong family manager can translate into a senior management role in an enterprise which in a sense, remains a family, fulfilling both ethical and financial goals.
The positive aspect of women's role as senior managers comes from the influential work of Americans Sally Helgeson and Julia Johnson [11] [12]. The first women managers, and "tracked" the daily routines of a number of the managers.
They argue that women's management style may have a sociobiological basis: women perceive differently, relate differently, and control differently when compared with their male counterparts (Helgeson, 2018) [12].
In the model which emerged from this research, women managers "take in" more detail in arriving at decisions-they are more analytical, rational and thoughtful. They act and organise differently from men, in ways which reflect a superior "emotional intelligence" compared with males. They are more attentive to the emotional needs of those below them, and above them. These are skills which the alpha-male manager often lacks. When the organisation is under threat, the male leader may enter a "fight or flight" mode, while the woman leader may "circle the wagons", using her male counterparts with strategic intelligence. Women managers support depressed and troubled employees, rather than firing them. In Helgesson's (2017) [12] account, they get the best out of people. Their approach to management is qualitative, rather than quantitative.
Any male bean-counter can calculate the bottom line: it takes a person who combines emotional and strategic intelligence to know how the organisation should change in order to improve the bottom line. This is one of the (several) ways in which women may excel in management. Woman are more empathic, less interested in profit for its own sake, more interested in the firm as a socially responsible organisation-although, as Belinda Parmar (2014) [13] argues, empathy may be the royal road towards profitability.
In this feminist model, women may lack (or ignore) any innate drive to "control and subjugate": their major driver, rather, is to meet the emotional needs of employees and customers alike, through co-operation and understanding in seeking to maximise a company's potential. Empathy with potential customers and clients is another important way in which women often outmatch men. Intelligent women executives do not engage in needless battles, and they may exercise the option to walk away (e.g. resign) from situations in which an unintelligent alpha male manager spoils for a fight. This may be one reason why there is a dearth of women in the top ranks of management (Parmar, 2014;Gordon, 2016) [13] [14].
An important question is this: if women, as a group, possess such excellent management skills, why are they underrepresented, and discriminated against, in so many Western enterprises (Bullough, Moore & Kalafotoglu, 2017) [15]?
One answer seems to be that not only are many men aggressively hanging on to positions of power in ways which are dysfunctional for their organisations: they In reading these accounts of successful women managers, we are struck by the similarity of this model with the accounts of the successful woman in Muslim cultures, past and present, who is not only supremely successful as a "strong family manager", but also in modern times when she graduates from university and enters professional employment is successful because she is a successful wife and mother, effectively running two organisations according to the same principles based on "emotional intelligence" [16].
We should add that this account of women managers' potential for success is based on an idealised model, and there are a number of ways in which men can undermine the "emotional friendliness" of women in organising work settings and commercial enterprises. Men can disrupt women's organisational power through "the masculine managerialism of conquest, competition and control" (Kerfoot & Knights, 1994;Knights, 2017) [17] [18]. Male sexism moves non-formally into many situations in the workplace, into sexually demeaning and even sexually assaultive comments, strategies and behaviours imposed on those women below them, or who are perceived as threats to their hegemony (Bates, 2014) [19].
In profound contrast, the Islamic solution to the mixing of genders within social institutions is to emphasise the ethical ground of respect and modesty, in a system of gender plurality. Contrary to Knights' (2015) [20] thesis that "if bodies are to matter, binaries need to shatter", Islam asserts the divinely inspired plurality of male and female sexuality, linked together by the ethics of modesty and mutual service. Women in organisations in which a majority of employees are Muslim will not, we assert, encounter sexual harassment. Such behaviour is anathema within a culture which is extremely cautious about sexual expression outside of the family unit. In organisations, women are not treated in the same way that men are treated: rather they are perceived as profoundly different, having special needs (for respect and modesty), with personal rights in their child-care roles not afforded to men. Muslim organisations are most likely to discriminate in failing to hire women for managerial or professional positions on grounds of patriarchy; but once women have been hired, although their promotion may be slow, their treatment will not involve sexual harassment of the kind recorded by Laura Bates (2014) [19] in Western cultures.

Minority and Muslim Women Seeking Managerial and Professional Employment in "Western" Organisations
Women (and especially minority women) who seek to rise in business organisations face the problems of "intersectionality", in which several disadvantaged statuses (e.g. gender, ethnicity, migration status) coincide ( [24]. Women in such settings may have to adopt "fluid identities" in order to be successful, knowing how to "present themselves in everyday life" (Goffman, 1978) [25] in roles in which they seek to avoid imposed stereotypes (Afshar, 2012;Veenstra, 2012) [26] [27]. In these accounts the very flexibility of a women's identity in a male-dominated world of industry and commerce allows these women to find niches and avenues of power (Afshar, 2012) [26]. It may be, as Parmar (2014) [13] argues, that  [33]. Muslim women in management roles in countries such as Britain are a small fraction of all women in management (Tariq & Syed, 2017) [46]. In order to succeed they have to draw on intersecting support networks, and to engage in pioneering education on behalf of Muslim women in leadership roles.

Women's Role in Traditional Islamic, Muslim-Majority Cultures
Traditionally, women have held both powerful and protected roles in Muslim women's equality has been proportional rather than absolute, and specific portions of The Qur'an specify that women require special treatment and respect in roles concerning family relationships, marriage and inheritance (Mernissi, 1991) [47]. Nevertheless, the Qur'an clearly prescribes the absolute moral, structural and spiritual equality of men and women in many roles and social institutions (Wadud, 1999;Esposito, 2003) [48] [49].  [56]. In many Muslim-majority societies today women are making considerable strides in educational equality, the first step in attaining the gender equality which Islam ordains (Ahmed, 1992) [60]. And as Ramadan (2010) [61] urges, women achieving structural and value equality with men in Islam, have the right to choose their own route along "the straight path of Islam", not that which men (including some "liberal" scholars) think that they should follow.  [13], and Helgeson (2018) [12]. Islam in this ideal model simply draws out the best of women's "natural" managerial skills (Anwar, 2006)  If one examines Muslim-majority countries governed by Shari`a, one will find that Islamic interpretation is highly variable and has differential impacts on the role of women (Mernissi, 2001 [78]. … due to historical events and male domination in Gulf society, there is much confusion between what Islam is, and what is merely culturally associated with Islam. While there is ongoing debate on interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence and women's role… at the root of the barriers to women's progress in the Gulf are traditional masculinist attitudes, which I will call an Islamic Gender Regime… The Islamic gender regime is premised on the biological differences between men and women, and it is these biological differences that determine social function. As such, men and women have complementary but different family responsibilities. Cultural processes assume that a woman will marry early; that her contribution to the family will be as homemaker; that the household will be headed by a man and that the man will provide financially and "protect" the family. Male protection is seen as justification for the exercise of authority over women in all areas of decision making that relates to the public sphere (Metcalfe, 2011, p. 13) [10].
The interpretation of the Muslim authors of the present paper concerning the Islamic perspectives on women as "leaders", is that a man's role as "protector and supporter" of the family means that he is an external person who earns money or who farms for food which he offers to the family manager (who is always a woman). The woman, like Kadijah the first wife of The Prophet, is the manager not only of the household but also of the family business. The subversive patriarchy which tries to assert that men are rulers of women, is un-Islamic (Hashmi, 2000) [52]. A husband acts as the external guard of the household, but ily (Nydell, 2012), [91] both men and women employers could receive social visits at work from family and friends: a coffee will be shared for 20 minutes, regardless of work demands. Special deference is given to women allowing them to leave work early in winter months, so that they arrive home safely before dusk.
Breast-feeding women (for up to two years after a child's birth) may arrive an hour late and leave work an hour early. Some companies provided onsite day-care, or subsidies for commercial day-care for women employees. Women had a year of maternity leave. Shorter paternity leaves were available for men, but were rarely taken up by men who thought that their roles lay completely outside of the home. However, both men and women would take the month's "honeymoon leave" allowed. In Gaza the companies studied paid for the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Israeli bombardment, as well as paying the medical expenses and death benefits for employees injured or killed by these bombardments. Both men and women are given special leaves to journey on the Haj (the obligatory once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Makka). The gender-relations ethos was, overall, one of respect for women, and sexual harassment was unthinkable in an Islamic ethos. Within each working day, up to an hour was set aside for ritual washing (wudu) and prayers, which all Muslim employees attended.
Nevertheless, a "glass ceiling" did exist, and only two of the 20 senior managers in the organisations studied were women. Women tended to be promoted diagonally rather than vertically, into specialist roles in human relations, finance and public relations. Companies sought to promote a good public image as generous employers, as one way of marketing products and services. Service rather than profit seemed to be the "bottom line", so long as the company provided enough income stream to adequately reward its employees.
We summarise this overview in a three-level model derived from Ali et al.

Conclusions
In writing this essay on Muslim women's progress towards executive managerial and professional roles in both Western and Muslim majority countries, we real-