Perceived barriers for women's career progression and its impact towards job performance in multinational companies in Malaysia

Abstract

Women in Malaysia have been in the labor force for many years. However, the number of women in Malaysia holding higher managerial positions is rare although women possess higher education qualification and experience compared to men. This paper investigates the existence of barriers that may prevent women from filling up the top management positions and further investigates how these perceived barriers affect their job performance based on the 90.69 percent feedbacks of employees working with Multinational Companies in Malaysia. From the findings, only lack of mentorship was found to be the major factor that bars women from achieving a higher managerial positions and is the only significant variable with job performance.