Gender Attitudes in Business Students: Beliefs and Values

Introduction and Significance

There is a body of evidence suggesting many disparities in the representation of gender across certain segments of academic and business professions. 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 many factors contribute to such trends — and many societies have made significant progress toward minimizing gender gaps — much remains to be understood about the challenges women face when entering certain professions.

This research considers whether there are differences inherent to the genders that could help explain the outcomes 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 will contrast these differences with a student population majoring in a different academic discipline.

Presentation of the Topic and Research Questions

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

In many cases, beliefs and values — coupled with attitudes toward work — can determine what kind of profession or occupation a person might seek. Furthermore, many of these factors appear to be correlated with or mediated by different aspects of gender and gender norms present in society. For example, there may be different preferences among genders regarding positions that could compromise personal ethics, different expectations about behaviors associated with gender roles in organizations, and even differences in leadership style used by members of different sexes. Although some research has been conducted on apparent differences between genders, attitudes toward work, and personality profiles in women in leadership roles, there does not appear to be much research specifically targeting these factors in new generations of female business students and their motivations for studying business practices.

Research Questions

How have women's attitudes, beliefs, and values changed over time relative to the perception of a position in a business environment? What is the current view of 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, and do these vary at different levels of study?

Are female students adopting traditionally male attributes to succeed in this environment — such as a greater willingness to make ethically compromising decisions they perceive as necessary for success — or are they beginning to craft their own style?

Hypotheses

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

H2. It is hypothesized that behavioral profiles will reveal many commonalities in female business students. It is also hypothesized that women at higher levels of study will exhibit higher levels of traits associated with business leadership, 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, resulting in an increased willingness among potential students to accept leadership roles and a high percentage of female students entering business programs. It is also hypothesized that even though male and female traits may be converging relative to previous generations, some differentiation between men and women will remain.

Literature Review

There is a body of research that has examined ethical values and beliefs along gender lines in many different circumstances. Personal and professional values and beliefs about the world, along with cultural norms, can have many implications for life in general, as well as for specific endeavors such as educational achievement or professional development. For example, one study examined personal value systems and the prioritization of work among a group of students in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the different objectives and motivations present 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 levels of motivation and future career paths.

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

1. Work should be diligent, but work should not become an idol — perfectionism can be idolatry.
2. God calls each person to a personal vocation.
3. Making a good living, even for one's family, is a secondary effect of the primary motive; material provision 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 differences in these perspectives based on gender, and found that the data did support this position. Specifically, females held an inflated perception of the extent to which the workplace culture would adhere to their personal values, while males exhibited a drastically different perception of how 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 with gender differences within some populations.

Given that beliefs and ethical values play such an important role in many aspects of life, significant attention has been devoted to how these beliefs arise during development, as well as the degree to which they can be static or dynamic throughout an individual's lifetime. The stage of life from adolescence to young adulthood has been defined as "emerging adulthood" — a period characterized by a high degree of change, diversity, and experimentation, typically followed by entrance into the labor force and other life-course transitions (Copen, 2008). These major transitions from one life stage to the next can mark important thresholds at which many beliefs or ethical ideals are either challenged or reinforced. Many beliefs are passed down through generations and serve as the basis of a worldview that must then be applied to the external environments one encounters. Therefore, transitional periods would reasonably either confirm or challenge worldviews as individuals traverse new stages in their lives.

There is significant evidence suggesting that the transmission of educational attainment from parents to children influences the timing of young adults' first unions, and that parents — and grandparents — influence young adults' beliefs, values, and behaviors (Copen, 2008). The evidence also demonstrates that young adults' values toward individualism and collectivism are malleable over the life course. There are likely stages in one's life at which these beliefs are particularly prone to change. For example, when an individual marries, there is an incentive to adopt a more collectivist-based perspective that includes consideration extending beyond the self; the same could be said of the transition to parenthood, in which one cares for a child. Since components of these roles can differ based on particular circumstances as well as gender, this could be one source of differences in the generation and confirmation of beliefs that each gender acquires through personal development.

One of the most important applications of an individual's values and beliefs occurs when people are required to make decisions that could harm others. A manager in an organization, for example, makes decisions about organizational strategy, operations, or human resources that can have profound impacts on the lives of others. It is reasonable to suspect that a manager's decision-making processes are directly influenced by the individual's personal value system, and that different value systems could lead to different outcomes with real consequences for employees or contractors.

Various models have been developed to better understand the links between personal values and ethical decision-making. For example, one attempt included a value inventory collecting self-reported levels of hedonism, achievement, and tradition, correlating these to distributive justice problems; another measured marketing professionals' values and decisions related to factors such as pricing and distribution, information and contacts, products and promotions, obligations and disclosure, and general honesty and integrity (Mumford, Helton, Decker, Connelly, & Van Doorn, 2003). The evidence from these studies suggests that elements such as fairness and adherence to professional norms can serve as the basis for values related to ethical decision-making in management. Further research did find a correlation between an individual's values and the decisions that person would make in a leadership position, and it was suggested that future research might provide insights into how educational experiences could make a positive contribution to shaping beliefs consistent with ethical decision-making grounded in personal integrity and authentic leadership (Mumford, Helton, Decker, Connelly, & Van Doorn, 2003).

Current research has also indicated that women are substantially underrepresented in top leadership positions in the business world — representing approximately 4% of executives on Wall Street, 14% of executives in Fortune 500 companies, and 36% of students in the top 10 MBA programs — despite being 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 factors behind stark gender differences in business-related positions and training programs compared to other occupations, and to develop theories about why this disparity exists. Different categories of explanations have been proposed, including current corporate practices and a combination of behavioral and cultural explanations.

Many people are aware of the concept of the glass ceiling, which posits that there are limited opportunities for women to advance in the corporate world despite stated equal-opportunity policies that are typically required by law. Although women might see a path to leadership positions based on official company policies, in practice few women reach these positions, largely due to informal or cultural preferences that select for males — either consciously or through subconscious biases (Oakley, 2000). For example, most high-level executives gain their positions through broad exposure to all business functions, exposure that is based on experience gained earlier in their careers. Since executives typically do not reach high-level positions until later in their careers, they must be identified and groomed earlier, and it has been argued that men are disproportionately granted these developmental opportunities. Therefore, even if no explicit bias exists at the executive level, bias at lower levels can prevent women from gaining the experience needed to become equally qualified — particularly in physically demanding industries such as mineral extraction or oil production, where women do not typically have equal access to the lower-level roles that build the necessary experience base.

Behavioral and cultural explanations also help account for many of the informal norms and subconscious perceptions underlying the glass ceiling. The behavioral double bind concept states that women do not have the same opportunities as men to be perceived as qualified, due strictly to gender norms (Oakley, 2000). For example, a woman who is assertive and adopts personality traits normally associated with male leaders may be perceived as overly aggressive — the so-called "bitch" perception — despite the fact that those same behaviors would be considered normal in her male counterpart. On the other hand, if a woman upholds the passive role associated with traditional gender norms, she may not appear assertive enough to be effective in a leadership capacity. Thus, virtually every behavioral style available to a woman carries a penalty in some situations. Similar gender-limiting phenomena are believed to exist in language styles, perceptions of gender and power, and the existence of "old boy networks" that may resist change (Oakley, 2000).

Another study used an experimental design to investigate whether women reacted more negatively than men to certain ethical compromises and found support for this hypothesis (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). Women reported less interest in jobs that entailed ethical compromises than men did, despite exhibiting no difference in interest when the job did not involve ethical compromises; their greater moral reservations explained their lower interest in such positions (Kennedy & Kray, 2014). If women implicitly associate business with immorality more than men do, this would support the idea that women are underrepresented in business careers because they prefer other positions. This was further supported by a related study that found women did not perceive the same level of ethical challenges in the legal profession — suggesting that while law is also competitive and potentially challenging to one's ethical beliefs, the overarching goal of advancing justice may mitigate those challenges in a way that has no clear parallel in for-profit organizations (Kennedy & Kray, 2014).

Gender differences may also have implications for the effectiveness of leadership among men and women who have reached the top executive level, although these questions have been difficult to investigate simply because so few female leaders have been available to constitute a reasonable sample. Previous research has suggested that the perception of leadership is at least partly based on stereotypes and personality types. The following stereotypes have been proposed (Brandt & Laiho, 2013): men are socialized to be assertive, independent, rational, and decisive, while women are expected to show concern for others, warmth, helpfulness, and nurturance.

One interesting question — now more accessible to study given the increase in women in leadership — is whether the same combinations of personality types are equally effective in leadership regardless of gender. For example, characteristics associated with transformational leadership include creativity, novelty, innovativeness, a tendency to take risks, courage, belief in people, being value-driven, being a lifelong learner, pragmatism, nurturance, and self-confidence — yet much of the foundational research identifying these characteristics was based on populations composed mostly of men (Brandt & Laiho, 2013).

One recent study was able to examine a population that included a significant proportion of female leaders, investigating the relationships between gender, personality, and transformational leadership. The results indicated that both gender and personality have an impact on leadership behavior, supporting previous studies that found differences in leadership style 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 also found that most leaders — regardless of gender — shared extraverted, sensing, thinking, and judging preferences most commonly associated with the transformational leadership model. Therefore, the research suggests that either gender can be an effective transformational leader, and that only slight variations in personality or style differentiate male and female leaders at the top level.

Conclusion

The literature review identified several ways in which beliefs, values, and attitudes differ between the genders, as well as differences in how each gender views work and leadership. Some of the studies were conducted over a decade ago and produced baseline measurements of trends that may be ongoing. Later research has had the benefit of being able to examine more female leaders who have broken through the glass ceiling and have challenged and altered many cultural norms that existed for generations. This could indicate that many gender norms previously held in organizations are becoming less prevalent.

Similar trends may also make it more socially acceptable for females to pursue business degrees and to embody more independent and assertive character traits and values. The value of this research lies in its potential to contribute knowledge about the current state of beliefs, values, and attitudes regarding these issues within a specific population. The information identified from this sample will not only provide insights into the student population regarding cultural norms and trends, but could also be compared to different samples from different populations to assess whether results are consistent. The data and findings could further be compared with studies conducted at different points in time to identify whether any trends are evident.

Works Cited

Brandt, T., & Laiho, M. (2013). Gender and personality in transformational leadership context: An examination of leader and subordinate perspectives. Leadership & Organizational Development Journal, 44–66.

Copen, C. (2008). Transmission and transitions: Young adults' beliefs, values and life course transitions in familial context. University of Southern California, 1–47.

Kennedy, J., & Kray, L. (2014). Who is willing to sacrifice ethical values for money and social status?: Gender differences in reactions to ethical compromises. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 52–59.

Mumford, M., Helton, W., Decker, B., Connelly, M., & Van Doorn, J. (2003). Values and beliefs related to ethical decisions. Teaching Business Ethics, 139–170.

Oakley, J. (2000). Gender-based barriers to senior management positions: Understanding the scarcity of female CEOs. Journal of Business Ethics, 321–334.

Underwood, J., & Harrison, A. (2009). Perfectionist at 20 — work-life issues at 40? Personal value systems and future implications. Interbeing, 31–37.