¶ … women are well-Suited for executive level positions in marketing.
This problem statement ties directly into the background issues of personal interest and why this issue is important. You can talk more about the gender pay gap, something the lack of female executives contributes to. There is a lot of background research about the glass ceiling in particular and gender roles in general. There has been some research about the challenges females face getting into math and science fields, but little study done about marketing. While it is assumed that women can be used in lower-level marketing roles (there is probably less evidence of gender bias at lower levels), there is a case to be made for gender bias against female marketing executives. Thus, the issue is one worthy of further study to identify either the problems or the solutions, or both.
This leads us to three good research questions.
What academic background contributes most to a woman's ascension to CMO or VP of Marketing? Which matter least?
2. What are the critical success factors for young women who aspire to be CMOs and VPs of Marketing today and in the future?
How have companies fared following the hiring of a female CMO?
The first two questions have obvious appeal for a couple of reasons. The first is that they speak directly to solutions to the problem of underrepresentation of women in marketing management. These are also easy questions to answer. Most companies publish bios of their executive team members on their website or in their annual reports. Thus, we can find out some of the qualification and career paths of females in management, and compare those to males in the same position.
The last question is also worth considering, if for no other reason than academic curiosity. Obviously, drawing conclusions will be a little bit more difficult because so much more goes into success than just the marketing executive, but it is worth considering if there are any differences before and after hiring a female marketing head. This information again is pretty easy to gather, using annual reports to ascertain revenue and profit figures, marketing expense ratios and using the Internet to gather share prices.
So we have three questions that speak directly to the research problem, and that are fairly easy to research using information that it publicly available.
