Why female leadership?

Why not?!!! This was a quite interesting question I got during an interview today. Why did I chose the topic I chose for my MBA dissertation "Female leadership and and the Glass ceiling effect: An investigation into career opportunities for women within the IT industry in Sweden".

Well, what appear obvious for me might not be the same for others. So my answer was (and still is) as follow: I have been seeing and experiencing a transparent wall or ceiling, stopping women to access upper echelon in companies (not only in the IT but more notable in male-dominated industry like... IT or Construction). So the logic as well as the curiosity lead my choice. A little push came as well from a lecturer during my Business leadership course of my MBA which was so inspiring (a women) and the discussions she lead or support or completed during this 6-weeks journey were extremely intense and inspiring (already said that!), which has definitely played a great role in my topic choice.

Female leadership comes regularly back on newspaper front-page as soon as a woman is nominated at a CEO or other executive level (note as well that it is OFTEN when the company is in difficulties that the leading group/BoD decide to promote a woman for the role supreme!). So the interest is there already. Moreover being ambitious and aiming for the higher level in the leading roles of companies, i have always been interested in questioning why so few women at top-position. Well the past has put men in decisions-seats and they still have problem to leave them for the other gender.

My conclusions (briefly here) were that mentalities are difficult to change and even in Sweden promoting so much the equality of opportunities between genders it is noteworthy the difficulties women have to get to operative top-management positions (you may find them in education, HR, PR, but still (too) few in CEO and other operating roles having greater decision power on the hiring of future leaders (which may more logically be at the image of already in place leaders, i.e. men...).
I will publish more information from my investigation when I receive the conclusion from the Board of examiner concerning my dissertation (two days left!).