Discretionary power of project managers in knowledge-intensive firms and gender issues

The scarcity of women among highly qualified professionals in business-to-business information and communication technologies (ICT) in Europe and in North America has been noted as recently as the late 1990s (Panteli, Stack, Atkinson, & Ramsay, 1999). The organization and management of work in such firms is typically project-based. This has many consequences, including: long working hours with fierce resistance to any reduction, unpaid overtime, high management expectations of employee flexibility to meet unanticipated client demands, and the need for employees to negotiate flexible work arrangements on a case-by-case basis with a project manager who often has much discretion on whether to accommodate such requests. We found that women are particularly disadvantaged in such a system, which could partly explain their under-representation in such jobs.