The employment of women managers and professionals in an emerging economy: gender inequality as an organizational practice

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1998  by Stephen J. Appold,  Sununta Siengthai,  John D. Kasarda

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The proportion of women in higher status positions is a key indicator of equity for those interested in social stratification. Because the position of the employer in the economy (Baron and Bielby, 1980) and the nature of internal labor markets (Althauser and Kalleberg, 1981) are central in determining individual status attainment (Rosenfeld, 1992), the occupancy of elite roles, whether defined by expert knowledge (Abbott, 1988) or direct control over others, is a critical indicator of the degree to which women have authority (Jacobs, 1992; Reskin and Ross, 1992). How women are employed also has important implications for organizational performance and for national economic growth. As the major setting for labor mobilization, organizational actions are pivotal for national competitiveness (North, 1990), and women offer valuable human resources that can be captured by national economies to achieve macroeconomic growth (Durand, 1947). Despite the advantages to be gained from employing women at their capacities, however, firms appear to underutilize women.

Looking at the relatively stable economies of industrialized countries, some observers have attributed the low proportion of women among the higher ranks of the private labor force to supply-side factors, most directly, a lack of qualified women, which may be due to societal steering mechanisms. Others have attributed the underrepresentation of women to demand-side factors, such as women's experiences at work, particularly discrimination. The issue is difficult to untangle because people participate in specific educational programs and enter specific career tracks in accordance with perceived opportunities, making the supply of qualified individuals dependent on sustained organizational demand (Reskin and Hartmann, 1986; Brinton, 1988). Research into the utilization of human resources is, therefore, hampered by the reciprocal causality between employment opportunities and the availability of those able to take advantage of them (England, 1992: chap. 2). Further, the effects of gatekeepers' practices are difficult to distinguish from those due to the actions and reactions of male coworkers.

Much of the previous empirical research comparing the employment of men and women has relied on extensive measurements of personal attributes. Aggregate differences between men and women are then separated into those attributable to group differences in average personal characteristics, such as education and experience, and those that are not. This technique, however, only reveals the degree to which the employment differences are due to measured individual attributes; all other factors are contained in an unexplained residual (Wolf and Fligstein, 1979) from which the operation of unmeasured demand factors are inferred. The work situation is frequently the missing link in the research on women's employment (Blum, Fields, and Goodman, 1994), and most research on organizational practices is subject to the endogeneity problem outlined above: Are women underrepresented in higher positions because there is a dearth of qualified female labor or because there is a dearth of firms willing to employ the women who are qualified?

An economy experiencing a rapid increase in the demand for high-skill labor provides an opportune research site to begin to sort out the issues of supply and demand. Further, the branch operations of multinational firms operating in the same dynamic host country approximate a natural experiment measuring how the national culture of multinational firms affects such transplants' hiring and promotion policies. At least in the short run, the supply of qualified women will not be materially affected by the presence of multinational firms from any particular country. Labor supply variations are held constant by the shared operating environment and timing of labor demand. Labor demand, however, may be responsive to the rapid growth in sales but could vary according to the nationality of the employing firm or the strength of male employees' preferences for gender-based social homophily (Blau, 1977; Pfeffer, 1983).

We examined the employment of women in Thailand, until recently one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world, among U.S.-based, Japan-based, and Thai firms. Some observers maintain that East Asian economic growth is due, to a large degree, to those countries' ability to mobilize women's labor for low-skill tasks, with women's status possibly even declining with development (Lim, 1990; Salaff, 1990). We concentrated on high-skill tasks performed by women as managers and professionals, an important yet too often neglected aspect of labor participation in emerging economies. Although the developing countries of Asia are playing increasingly active roles in the world economy, systematic research on high-skill female labor has been generally confined to the industrialized countries (e.g., Kamerman and Kahn, 1981; Roos, 1985; Wright and Baxter, 1995; Rosenfeld, Van Buren, and Kalleberg, 1998). While we performed our research in Thailand, our concerns are theoretical, and we believe our findings are transferable not only to other developing countries but also to the more developed countries, such as the United States, and have implications for the management of diversity. We begin by providing some background on the significance of emerging economies and highlight the often-overlooked importance of women in management positions in rapidly developing countries.