GLASS walls are more of a threat to career women than the traditional glass ceiling as they box females in to certain roles, a leading academic has claimed.

Professor Sharon Bolton, head of the school of management at Stirling University, believes "occupational segregation by gender" is preventing women from advancing to the top in management.

In a paper published on the academic research website The Conversation, she said: "To be selected for top management jobs, it is necessary to have diverse experience across different company areas.

"As long as women are boxed into certain roles, this will not happen -- hence the need to break down glass walls before women can break through the glass ceiling to top management."

Professor Bolton, who is the university's Dean of Equality & Diversity and a finalist in the Institute of Directors Scotland Director of the Year Awards, added that the position of women in the global labour market does not simply reflect their actual skills and career choices, but is a product of "institutionalised exclusion".

She said that, while allowing for the mass entry of women to certain occupations, this was responsible for keeping them unequally positioned economically.

In her article, Professor Bolton writes that without action, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) forecasts that it could take as long as 200 years for women to achieve parity with men at management level globally, while it will take 80 years in developed countries.

She added: "When examining differences in workplace opportunity, management roles are useful indicators of equality.

"Becoming a manager or senior executive offers the largest chance to achieve economic equality and to influence access for other women in the labour market."

According to the ILO, jobs such as human resource management, PR and communication are almost entirely female-dominated. But women are a much smaller minority in functional areas like finance, research, operations, and general management.

In its recent report Women in Business and Management: Gaining Momentum, the ILO also refers to an equal 50-50 gender split in middle management roles.

Female CEOs of publicly listed companies, however, account for less less than five per cent in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, and 2.8 per cent in the European Union.

In the UK, women comprise 60 per cent of junior managers, 40 per cent of middle managers, 20 per cent at senior levels and less than half of that in CEO positions.

This gender-based pyramid structure, identified by the Chartered Management Institute, is not unique to the UK.

While FTSE 100 companies may have experienced a rise in the number of women on company boards last year, this reflects an increase in non-executive, as opposed to executive, directors. The former do not have the same involvement in the daily running of the company.

The latest census figures show that the level of women in senior employment roles has increased by just six percentage points over a ten-year period.

Data from the 2011 survey shows that females accounted for 36 per cent of people working in a higher managerial, administrative or professional occupations, compared to 30 per cent in the 2001 report.

Figures released by the Scottish Government in December last year also revealed that just over a third (36%) of members on public boards are women, with the study - by Napier University - claiming the country has a "considerable way to go" to achieve gender equality in the boardroom.