Gender Differences in Business

Gender Attitudes in Business Students

An Analysis of Beliefs, Values, and Attitudes Relative to Gender and Professions

Significance and Conclusion

There is a body of evidence that suggests many disparities in the representation of gender in certain segments of the academic and business professions. For example, previous research has indicated that women, on average, are less likely to attend business school than males and are also less likely to hold high-ranking positions in organizations. Although there are many factors that are involved in such trends, and many societies have made significant progress towards minimizing the gender gaps, there is still much to be understood about the challenges that women face into entering into certain professions. This research will consider whether there is differences inherent in the genders that could help explain the outcomes that have been observed in various professions. The proposal outlines a research plan that will investigate differences in beliefs, attitudes, and values relative to work in a population of business students and contrast these differences with a student population majoring in a different academic discipline.

Presentation of the Topic

There is a body of research that has examined ethic values and beliefs along gender lines in many different circumstances. Personal and professional values and/or beliefs about the world and cultural norms can have many implications for life in general, as well as in specific endeavors such as educational achievement or professional development. Many of these beliefs or ethical positions are typically are passed down through the generations and are frequently challenges when people reach major milestones in their lives. For example, after a transition to college, a student will often have to reconcile new information with their previous beliefs, revise them so that they fit with the new information, and in some cases beliefs are replaced with new individual beliefs or entire belief systems.

In many cases beliefs and values, coupled with attitudes towards work, can determine what kind of profession or occupation that you might seek in your life. Furthermore, many of factors seem to be correlated or mediated by different aspects of gender and gender norms that are present in society. For example, there may be different preferences among gender towards positions that could compromise their ethics, types of expectations that are perceived about behaviors associated gender roles in organizations, and even the style of leadership that is used by member of different sexes, as the research suggests. Although, some research has been conducted about the differences that are apparent in genders, attitudes towards work, and personality profiles that have studied women in leadership roles, there does not appear to be much research in the literature that is target on these factors in new generations of female business students and their motivations for studying these practices.

Research Question

How have women's attitudes, beliefs, and values changed over time relative to the perceptions of a position in a business environment? What is the current view about the glass ceiling among female business students and has its salience been reduced?

Are there behavioral profiles that are more common in the new generation of business students? At varying levels of study?

Are female students taking on male attributes to be successful in this environment? Such as being more willing to making ethically compromising decisions that they perceive will be required to be successful? Or are they beginning to craft their own style?

H1. It is hypothesized that women are beginning to adopt more masculine traits at a greater rate as more and more women have accepted leadership roles and have influenced the overall business culture.

H2. It is hypothesized that the behavioral profiles will reveal many commonalities in female business students. It is also hypothesized that women who are at higher levels will have higher levels of the traits associated with leadership in business such as individualism, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism among others.

H3. It is hypothesized that the normalization of female leadership and the change in cultural norms and barriers related to women will attract women to these opportunities and there will be an increased willingness among potential students to accept these roles and thus there will be a high percentage of female students enter into business programs. It is also hypothesized that even though a trend may exist in which male and females are closer in nature than previous generations, there will still be some differentiation between men and women.

Literature Review

There is a body of research that has examined ethic values and beliefs along gender lines in many different circumstances. Personal and professional values and/or beliefs about the world and cultural norms can have many implications for life in general, as well as in specific endeavors such as educational achievement or professional development. For example, one study examined how a personal values system as well as a personal value of work and its prioritization among a group of students, in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of many of the different objectives and motivations for students included in the population (Underwood & Harrison, 2009). The combination of such factors in a population at a relatively early stage in their professional careers can have a significant influence on their levels of motivation are their future career paths.

To investigate the different perspectives that exist in this population, the researchers used a three-tiered framework that was based on the students' perceptions of the role work based on their religious views. The argument was made that since the majority of students have some religious basis for their belief systems towards work and these three categories were proposed to measure differences (Underwood & Harrison, 2009):

1. Work should be diligent, but work should not become idol. Perfectionism can be idolatry.

2. God calls each person to a personal vocation

3. Making a nice living, even for one's family is a secondary effect to the primary motive. Making a nice living is under God's control and He has the right to choose either riches or poverty for his child.

The researchers hypothesized that there would be significant difference in these perspectives based on gender and found that the data did support this position. Specifically, females had an inflated perception of the extent that the work environments' culture would adhere to their own personal values while males exhibited a drastically different perception of the extent their belief systems would align with those in the workplace (Underwood & Harrison, 2009). This demonstrates that value systems and personal orientations to work can correlate to gender differences within some populations.

Given that beliefs and ethical values play such an important role in lives on many different levels, there has been a significant amount of attention devoted to how these beliefs arise during development, as well as the degree in which these beliefs can be static or dynamic throughout an individuals' lifetime. For example, the stage of life from adolescence to young adulthood has been defined as 'emerging adulthood', a time period characterized by a high degree of change, diversity and experimentation, typically followed entrance into the labor force are examples of life course transitions which occur during young adulthood (Copen, 2008). The major transition people's lives from one stage to the next can mark an important threshold in which many of their beliefs or ethical ideals can be challenged or supported in some cases. For example, many beliefs are passed down through generations and these ideals can serve as the basis of a worldview which then must be applied to the external environments in which one encounters. Therefore, the transitional periods would reasonably either confirm or challenge worldviews as individuals traverse new stages in their lives.

There seems to significant evidence that suggests the transmission of educational attainment from parents to children influences the timing of young adults' first unions as parents -- and grandparents -- influence young adults' beliefs, values and behaviors (Copen, 2008). Furthermore, the evidence also demonstrates young adults' values toward individualism and collectivism are malleable over the life course. Furthermore, there are also likely stages in one's life in which these beliefs are likely to change. For example, when an individual gets married then they have an incentive to adapt more of a collectivist-based perspective that includes more consideration that goes beyond the self and the same could be said in the case of a transition to parenthood in which one cares for a child. Since components of these roles can be different by considerations of particular circumstances as well as gender, it is reasonable to suggest that this could be one source of differences in the generation and confirmation of different beliefs that each gender acquires through their personal development.

One of the most important applications of the values and beliefs that an individual hold is when people are required to make decisions that could do harm to others. One common example of such judgments can be illustrated by a manager in an organization whose decisions about things such as organizational strategy, operations, or human resources can have profound impacts on the lives of others. However, it is reasonable to suspect that manager's decision making processes are directly influenced by the individual's personal value system and different value systems could led to different outcomes which can have real consequences that directly impact the lives of employees or contractors that these decisions affect.

There have been various models developed that have attempted to better understand the links between personal values and ethical decision making. For example, one attempt included a value inventory that collected data about self-reported levels of hedonism, achievement, and tradition correlated these to distributive justice problems and another measured the values of marketing professionals' values and decisions related to factors such as (Mumford, Helton, Decker, Connelly, & Van Doorn, 2003): 1) Pricing and distribution, 2) Information and contacts, 3) Products and promotions, 4) Obligations and disclosure, and 5) General honesty and integrity. The evidence of these studies suggests that elements such as fairness and adherence to professional norms can serve as the basis for values that related to ethical decision making among management. Further research did in fact find a correlation among and individual's values and the decisions that they would make in a position of leadership and it was suggested that future research might be able to provide insights into how educational experiences might be able to make a positive contribution to shaping beliefs that would be consistent with ethical decision making based on a personal sense of integrity and authentic leadership (Mumford, Helton, Decker, Connelly, & Van Doorn, 2003).

Current research has also indicated that women that women are substantially underrepresented in top leadership positions in the business world (4% of executives on Wall Street), Fortune 500 companies (14% executives), as well as business school (36% in the top 10 MBA programs); despite evidence to suggest that roughly equally represented in other qualified professions such as law school or medical school (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). Such evidence has led researchers to question the differences in the observations that highlight stark gender differences in business related positions and training programs compared to other occupations and develop theories as to why this might be the case. Furthermore, different categories of theories have been developed that include current corporate practices and/or a combination of behavioral and cultural explanations.

Many people are aware of the concept of the glass ceiling which roughly posits that there are limited opportunities for women to advance in the corporate world despite the fact that are stated equally opportunity policies that are typically in place and required by law. Therefore, although women might see a path in which they could progress to a position of leadership in an organizational setting based on the company's official policies, in practice few women are able to reach these position based more on informal or cultural preferences that select for males either consciously, or in many cases through subconscious biases (Oakley, 2000). For example, most high level executives gain their positions by being associated with all of the business functions and this association is based off of experience gained earlier in their careers.

Since executives typically do not reach high level positions until later in their careers, they have to be identified earlier in their careers to receive this experience and it has been argued that it is typically men that are granted these positions. Therefore, even though there may not be biasness evident at the executive level in terms of gender, biasness at lower levels can prohibit women the experience needed to become equally qualified; especially in industries that are physically demanding, such as in mineral extraction or oil production, in which women do not typically have equal opportunities to gain experience in the physically demanding lower level positions.

Examples of behavioral and cultural explanations help to explain many of the cultural norms and subconscious perceptions that can also explain all, or part, of the existence of a glass ceiling. For example, the behavioral double blind concept states that women do not have the same opportunities to be perceived as qualified as men based strictly on gender norms (Oakley, 2000). For example, the women who are aggressive and adopt some of the same personality traits that would normally be associated with male leaders, could be considered overly aggressive based on their perceived gender norms (the "bitch" perception), despite the fact the behaviors would be assumed normal for their male counterparts. On the other hand, if a woman upholds the passive role associated with traditional norms, then she may not appear aggressive enough to be effective in leadership. Thus, each style of behavior that a woman can represent has virtually no chance for success in some situations. Similar types of gender limited phenomenon are believed to exist in language styles, perceptions of gender norms, perceptions of gender and power, and the existence of "old boy networks" that may be resistant to change (Oakley, 2000).

Another study used an experimental design to investigate whether women reacted more negatively than men in certain ethical compromises and found support to verify this hypothesis based on the results (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). Furthermore, in regards to difficult business decision making that sometimes ethical compromises, women reported less interest in it than men did, despite exhibiting no difference in interest when the job did not entail ethical compromises and the greater moral reservations explained why they were less interested in jobs involving ethical compromises (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). It follows that if women implicitly associate business with immorality more than men do, this would provide support for the idea that women are underrepresented in business careers because they would prefer other positions which was also supported by the fact that a related study found that women did not see the same level of ethical challenges in the law profession which was used to contrast these findings (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). Even though the profession of law might be a competitive profession that also can have many challenges to an ethical belief system, the overarching goal to advance justice can mitigate these challenges whereas there may not exist parallels in a for-profit organization.

Gender differences may also have some implications for the effectiveness of leadership in males and women who have reached the top executive level, however these questions have been difficult to investigate simply due to the fact that there have been so few female leaders that have been available to constitute a reasonable sample size. Previous research has suggested that the perception of leadership is at least partly based on stereotypes and personality types associated with leadership and the follow stereotypes have been proposed (Brandt & Laiho, 2013):

Mare socialized to be assertive, independent, rational and decisive

Women are expected to show concern for others, warmth, to be helpful and to nurture

However, one interesting perspective that can only now be studied given the increase in women leaders in the business world is whether the same combinations of personality types are effective relative to leadership models based on gender. For example, the personality characteristics regarded as belonging to transformational leaders include for example: creativity, novelty, innovativeness, a tendency to risk, courage, believing in people, being value-driven, being life-long learners, pragmatism, nurturing, feminine attributes and self-confidence are characteristics that have been associated with transformational leadership have been based on populations that were mostly composed of men (Brandt & Laiho, 2013).

One study was recently able to study a population that included a significant proportion of female leaders and investigated the relationships between gender, personality, and transformational leadership and the results indicated that both gender and personality have an impact on leadership behavior, and accordingly this study supported previous studies stating that there are differences in leadership according to gender (Brandt & Laiho, 2013). The results generally uphold the idea that women tend to be more nurturing while men tend to be more confrontational but found that most leaders shared the extraverted, sensing, thinking and judging preferences are most common among the transformational leadership model. Therefore, the research would suggest the either gender could be transformational leaders and that only slight variations in personality or style are present.

Methodology and Design

The general data for analysis can be collected through quantitative methods that are based upon many survey designs that have been employed in many different studies. For example, Rokeach Value Survey has been used in many analyses, which is a collection of 18 terminal values which respondents rank in order of importance or desirability in life; including scales such as the individualism scale includes (Copen, 2008): 1) an exciting life (novelty, adventure), 2) a sense of accomplishment (achievement), 3) personal freedom (independence, free choice, autonomy) and skill (being good at something you enjoy doing) and the collectivism scale which includes: 1) religious participation (working with others in your own church or organization); 2) friendship (meaningful relations with others who really care); 3) loyalty to your own (family and loved ones, church or group); and 4) patriotism (working for my country). This scale could be used as a baseline to compare many different values among the intended population such as if females have become increasingly individualistic who pursue business degrees, if there are differences based upon the level of study, pursuit of accomplishment and/or power, and if there are differences in females pursing other degrees.

There are also many surveys that are focused on building a personality profile. For example, Brandt and Liaho (2015) used the MBTI. The MBTI is a self-assessment instrument, where the respondent selects one of two options for every item and includes scores on four bipolar dimensions: extraversion-introversion (E/I), sensing-intuition (S/N), thinking-feeling (T/F) and judging-perceiving (J/P). A five factor model of personality, which includes agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism as some of the factors that have correlated with leadership, can also be used as an alternative personality scale and is popular among researchers and is readily available. Furthermore, it is entirely possible to find previous generations of research that may have used similar scales.