Overcoming Barriers to Female Managers' Career Development in Furniture Manufacturing SMEs in China and Vietnam

Female leadership and women's career development have been widely discussed in academic studies, business schools, organisational management philosophy, and daily societal topics. Despite significant endeavours to improve gender diversity and parity in managerial roles, especially senior to executive ones, in the corporate workplace, women still face more challenges and difficulties in achieving their higher goals along their career paths. As a fundamental part of the industry sector, women with senior and higher positions in the furniture manufacturing field are rare. The need for more women leadership is against the field's shared interests in attracting more talent, accelerating industrial transformation, and achieving a new leadership model in the post-COVID era. Applying a qualitative in-depth interview approach, the research collates data from 16 practitioners from 14 Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese furniture manufacturing SMEs with purposive sampling. The study discloses that the key impediments that lead to women's strenuous career growth in senior and executive management teams in furniture manufacturing SMEs encompass promotion mechanisms, professional expertise, gender bias, family-related responsibilities, social networking, and age; the secondary obstacles that rank closely behind include resource distribution, self-doubt, low ambition, and marital status; along with the minor barriers that consist of "Queen Bee" syndrome, maternity leave and lactation, sexual harassment, and workplace gaslighting. The study contributes to conducting first-hand empirical research in Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese furniture manufacturing SMEs, specifying the career-development barriers to female managers in those SMEs, concentrating on figuring out how to overcome those obstacles for female practitioners' career development in those SMEs, implementing simultaneous research in China and Vietnam; and supplementing relevant research in women's career development in the furniture manufacturing industry.