Quite simply, she says there isn’t one. Dale travels the countryside espousing the kind of views in her Lingerie Logic semiars that, she admits, do not go down very well with your average gender equality activist.
“I know about glass ceilings, actually I don’t believe in them. The only reason you have a glass ceiling is to powder your nose on the way up,” Dale told WSBA.
“Women are not good, frankly, at negotiating their own positions in the workplace. “My whole life, I’ve worked in a male-dominated industry. I’m used to it and I now have a business that mentors women and teaches them to negotiate. Dale said the statistics clearly tell us the business landscape is male-dominated.
“When we look at it, women have only been active, full-time in the workforce since the mid-1940s,” she said. “We’re still in the early stages of evolution and yet we’re wanting to catch up really, really quickly and yet we don’t have the same number of females who have been in the workforce as long, we don’t have the same generational exposure.”
Dale was scathing of a recent survey carried out by Executive Women Australia which claimed 60 per cent of women cited male-dominated referral networks as a significant barrier.
“I am appalled to read that the EWA report reveals that women are still expecting the business world to adapt to their needs,” Dale wrote in a response to the article on WSBA’s website.
“I am a female businesswoman who has worked in male-dominated markets for the past 38 years. “I have achieved senior management positions in multi-national organisations, I now sit on preside over Boards, not because I am a woman but because I am the right person for the job.”
Dale went on to say that she worked with, managed, networked with and developed her networks within the business marketplace by successfully adapting to her environment and being “relevant, well informed and pro-active”.
“It insults me to think that I need special conditions applied to me as a female in order to succeed,” she said.
“It is about time women stopped blaming external influences and started realising that if they are to succeed. They must adapt not expect their environment to do so.”
She conceded senior roles were often appointed through referrals, but that did not exclude women. “It simply means that the women have to develop their own position in those networks - it is not a closed shop and there are plenty of successful women to prove it,” she said.
For more information on Dale’s presentations or her book ‘Lingerie Logic – How to climb the corporate ladder without losing your skirt’ visit www.stephaniedale.com.au
