After years of slow progress, the glass ceiling remains. While women are asking whether promotion is really worth it, men must ask if their own management is to blame

Last month, when the government's Equality and Human Rights Commission launched its latest Sex and Power report, it appeared to show that the number of women in top jobs is declining in many sectors for the first time in over a decade. At about the same time, we had the Republican national convention and the selection of Sarah Palin as the vice presidential candidate. While Australia appointed its first ever female governor general. So have women actually shattered the proverbial glass ceiling? With so many conflicting messages, it is difficult to tell.

If we look at the evidence, the number of women in senior managerial roles has increased slowly but steadily over the last three decades. The Institute of Management and Renumeration Economics found that less than half a per cent of directors in the 1970s and 1980s were women, rising to nearly four per cent by the end of the millennium, and increasing further until this year. So women have moved very slowly up the organisational hierarchy, but not at any speed, nor in substantial numbers at the higher reaches. And, if we believe the latest report, the trend is now downward. Why is this? Cultures in many businesses are still very male orientated, with management styles that are autocratic and bureaucratic, as opposed to consensual and participative, and certainly not family friendly.

In a recent CMI Quality of Working Life survey of a large sample of UK managers (from chairman to junior), which I carried out with Professor Les Worrall, we found that UK managers were even more autocratic and less participative than a comparable group of Australian bosses. In addition, in many UK businesses, there is an intrinsic long-hours culture, which is antithetical to the family life that many women value. If men's identity is primarily tied into their work role, then men are likely to focus more on work and less on the family.

While women may be interested in pursuing careers and being successful at work, many put the family higher on their hierarchy of needs. We rarely read in men's magazines about men having to juggle their work-life balance. And if the truth be known, working women are still taking on the primary responsibilities in their non-work time for child rearing and home-making.

Given these factors, it is not surprising that many working women ask themselves whether promotion is worth pursuing. Many instead opt out, either by not seeking further promotion, or by leaving organisational life to build their own businesses so that they are more in control of their work and family life.

Women want to be recognised for a job well done but generally do not want to aggressively compete with others in the maelstrom of corporate life. Virginia Woolf put it best when she wrote: "Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, I believe, looming in her way".