Gender Objectivity in International Business Management:
the Probability of Women Gaining Recognition and Acceptance
in the Global Realm of Business
Introduction
In Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt named the 1990s as the decade of women in leadership. He is optimistic about the role of women in the workforce. For one thing, women are ubiquitous: As he points out, women without children are even more likely to work than men in that category – 79 versus 74%.
Many may believe that marginalization of women have been eradicated along with the seeming changed notion of women being somebody belonging to the home raising children and attending to household work. Many would argue that women are now equal with men. After all, we are few decades into the women’s movement. The civil rights act is almost 30 years old, and the resulting executive orders deal directly with, and enforce, equal employment opportunity for women. And surely, today’s generation of women is far more capable of dealing with the problems that confronted women in the past.
If we will accept this simple summary of the present we may not find value in studying gender objectivity in International Business Management and the probability of women ever gaining equal recognition and acceptance in the realm of International Business for the problems are not simple nor at a deeper level have things changed all that much.
There is little doubt that the legal drive to enforce equal opportunity has succeeded in making business organizations more aware of women both in blue-collar and managerial jobs. Simultaneously, the women’s movement has heightened women’s awareness of themselves, their rights and their work situations. There are evidences that more women now hold management positions than they did twenty or thirty years ago, yet the most recent statistics show that while women make up 39% of the labor force, less than 5% of Officials, Managers and Proprietress are women.
However, why are they so small? The explanation lies at least in part in the concept on which the equal opportunity laws are based. These laws legislate for equal opportunity. They do not and cannot legislate truly equal access to that opportunity, and most importantly, they cannot ensure that people who have traditionally been discriminated against will immediately and automatically demonstrate the ability to take advantage of whatever access to opportunity may exists.
At the same time there is a real growing reaction to the enforcement of equal opportunity. It comes from those whose opportunities have been cut back in order to provide room for the inclusion of legitimized outsiders. These people who must make room for newcomers are becoming hurt, angry, resentful. While law controls formal structure, the implementation of its well-intended thrust must take place through the mechanisms of the informal structure. And in industry that informal structure is populated almost entirely by men, the same men whose opportunities have now been curtailed.
In most organizations the informal system of relationships finds both its origin and its present function in the male culture and in the male experience. It forms, its rules of behavior, its style of communication and its mode of relationships grow directly out of the male developmental experience. This cannot be viewed as something bad or good. It is real. Men founded and developed the vast majority of organizations we know. Men made them places where they could work and live and their settings were intended for both comfortable and familiar. And if organizations in general are dominated by the male culture, then we need to note that at the managerial level, and particularly in its highest ranks, the informal system is truly a basis of the male lifestyle.
If we think of men who belong to these informal systems as the insiders – people who understand and support each other, the structure, and the rules; people who share common aspirations and dreams; people who grew up with similar backgrounds; who played together, learned together, competed together; and concurrently we think of how differently women grow up: their different orientations, expectations, aspirations and experiences – then we can understand why in spite of the law, very little may really have changed for women.
What makes this particularly threatening to the future of women in management is that the informal system is at the heart of the middle management function and grows still more critical with every step upward. Few women are part of this system and most women don’t even recognize it exists. Thus a picture emerges in which those people whom we have called insiders operate knowledgeable and carefully within a system whose membership typically excludes women; a system which reacts to threats to its members by functioning in such a way as to make it even more difficult for women to become part of it.
Review of Related Literature
A number of studies have been made in connection with women in the business world. Most of which hail the women who made it to the top management, as in A few Good Women by Jane White (1992). Featured in the book are women par excellence, all from the United States. These include Karen Reimer, the Director of Corporate Transactions for Honeywell Inc.; Shirley Prutch of Martin Marietta who is considered the first female to be named vice president of the $5.8 billion corporation in 1979, after having already attained the presidency of Share, an organization of IBM computers, in 1974; Nancy Faunce of Eastman Kodak; Loraine Binion of Levi Strauss and Co.; Sara Westendorf of Hewlett-Packard Co.; Melissa Cadet of River West Developments; Jacquie Arthur of M/A-Com Inc.; Linda Wroblewski of Richard Eisner and Co.; Sara Levinson of MTV; Philiss Swerskey of AI Corp. Inc. and Carlene Ellis of Intel Corporation.
In a much earlier endeavourer, Henning and Jardim (1976) jointly examine women executives at that time. The study encompasses a wide spectrum of women in management – their assumptions, perceptions and behavior; men in management and the organizational environment; and real and potential outcomes for both men and women in terms of career achievement.
Other studies dealt with surveys on numbers of women in the realm of different professions, including business.
Naisbitt (2000) says that in many professions women have increased from a minority as low as 10% in 1970 to a critical mass ranging from 30 to 50 percent. He also points to the growth of Working Women magazine, which at a circulation of 900,0000 in 1988 is surpassed only by the Wall Street Journal among business publications.
The number of women joining the ranks of certain profession has mushroomed over the last three decades, according to Time Magazine (1989). The population of female lawyers and judges has sky-rocketed from 7,500 in 1960 to more than 180,000; female doctors from 15,672 to 108,000, and female engineers from 7, 404 to 174,000.
The demographic makeup of institutions that provide the imprimatur for success in business has been found to change as well. In the 1950s, women made up only 20% of college undergraduates in contrast to 58% today, and two-thirds of them dropped out to get their “Mrs.” Degree instead of holding for their BA (White, 1992).
In an anecdote in Business Month in 1990, it is stated that when Harvard University first grudgingly accepted women to its business school in 1959, while women are allowed to attend class with their male peers, these women had to sit in the back of their exams at Radcliffe College. The gray eminences at Harvard would have a tough time finding enough room in the back of the class for females if they tried to enforce the practice now: Women now account for 37% of MBA students, compared to 4% in 1972. In the same time period, the percentage of women at Stanford’s Business school has mushroomed from 2% to 43%, and at Columbia University from 7% to 42%.
However, these numbers only tell half of the story. They reflect the fact that the expectations of women have certainly improved; women expect to pursue a college degree and they expect to be successful in the workplace/ However, when one starts to measure statistics reflecting success – i.e., the numbers of women in the top management – you’re no longer measuring expectations but acceptance. Unfortunately, most men don’t want women in the club (White, 1992).
There are only so many jobs to go around. But one very seldom see COOs, CFOs or even Executive Vice Presidents either. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 1.7 % of corporate officers are women, according to the statistics in early 1900s done by Glinow, a professor in the School of Business at the University of Southern California.
The magazine that invented the term Fortune 500 came up with similar findings. When Fortune Magazine examined 1990 proxy statements of 799 of the top public companies it found only 19 women listed among the highest paid officers or directors – or less than one half of a percent.
It was also found that minority women find it tougher. Black females made up just 2% of the managers in companies with 100 or more employees in 1988, compared with Black men, who accounted for 3% of this group and white women, who totaled 23%, according to the data available from the Equal Opportunity Commission (1990). Not one black woman was among the top 25 Black managers in corporate America when Black Enterprise magazine ran an article naming them in 1988.
Studies of how far women have moved up within individual professional specialties – banking, accounting, finance, etc., also produce dismal findings.
Statement of the Problem
This researcher finds the necessity for a study that specifically tackles gender objectivity or sensitivity in international business, especially in Joint Ventures. The general objective of this study is to identify why women are marginalized in the realm of international business. Specifically, this study will try to answer the following queries:
Nature and Significance
Although a whole gamut of studies have focused on the status of women in the business community, limited studies, if any, have traversed the boundaries of local businesses. This writer deems it necessary to fill this wide gap of knowledge concerning the role of women in the business world as a whole by zeroing in on the realm of International Business, specifically International Joint Ventures (IJV). This writer feels that the marginalized status of women in local business will be reflected, if not magnified all the more in International Business, an arena more powerful and multifaceted.
An IJV is a distinct enterprise, a multi-organizational agreement, created as an alliance between two or more parent organizations working across country borders in designing-managing venture (Woodside, 1996). In real-life, designing and IJV usually takes six months to three years. The decision process in creating IJV is messy and time-consuming, more so its management.
This study will be a significant endeavor in establishing the role, if any, that women play in International Business, specifically in IJV. It will shed light to the inquiry why women seem not to par with men in the territory that is international business. It will discover the tough nature of the so-called “old boys club” and why these is difficult to penetrate. The points at which women seemed to be on a disadvantage will be discovered and considered and carefully examined. In the end, a recommendation will be made that may give pointers to businesswomen to reach top IJV management.
Methodology
A number of IJV top management, both males and females, will be surveyed and interviewed as to the realm of this study. People in the top management of five to six IJVs based all over the world will be sent questionnaires pertaining to the topic. Their cooperation will be fervently sought after. Those that are based locally, if any, will be visited and observed. A descriptive analysis (with strictest confidence given to financial aspect) of its organization will be undertaken, form the organizational structure down the most intricate detail permitted. The object is to find out the exact nature of IJV, of how powerful and complex it is.
In line with the descriptive analysis of two or more IJVs the women in these tough ventures will be examined. Interviews will be scheduled to cover the information that is vital to this study, such as the characteristics of some top (or middle) management women. Their educational and family background will be examined and will be correlated with the success they achieved using Pierson Correlation. The data will be coming from accomplished questionnaire and interviews.
At the end of the data gathering period this researcher must have gathered enough information on (1) the IJVs under study; (2) the characteristics of the top management and (3) the women in these IJVs. It is supposed that not so many women have penetrated this realm, save for those that hold secretarial jobs.
In line with these data gathering objectives the following points will be given enough attention for each data category:
On the IJVs:
On the top management:
On Women in Top Management:
References:
Bell, Ella. “Both Racism and Sexism Block the Path to Management for Minority
Women,” The Wall Street Journal. July 25, 1990.
Henning, Margaret and Jardim, Anne. The Managerial Woman. Pocket Books in
New York. 1976.
Naisbitt, John. Megatrends 2000.
Statistics on female participation in certain professions and college enrollments
on “Onward, Women!” Time. December 4, 1989.
“Topping Out”. Statistics about female MBAs at Harvard, Stanford and Columbia.
Executive Female, 1989.
White, J. A Few Good Women: Breaking the Barriers to Top Management.
Prentice-Hall. 1992
“Why Women Still Don’t Hit the Top,” Survey results. Fortune, July 30, 1990.
“Women on the Verge of Being CEO”. Anecdote on female MBAs at Harvard in 1959. Business Month. April 1990.
Woodside, A., et al. Creating and Managing Joint Ventures. Quorum Books.
1996.