Women Empowerment - Research Proposal Example

and Section # of INTRODUCTION: Women empowerment is a highly debated and talked about topic in the main stream today. For years, steps have been taken to ensure women are treated as men’s equals especially in the developed modern societies. The status of women in all walks of life is considerably better compared to half a century ago. Laws and regulations are in place to make sure that organizations and businesses treat women as men’s equal when it comes to pay scale, respect, appraisals etc. This research methodology is designed to understand and gauge the reasons for increased women empowerment across managerial levels in the United Kingdom. Although laws and regulations have been in place for quite some time, research has showed that there has been a spike in women’s involvement in managerial position in the United Kingdom. This comprehensive research methodology provides a brief overview of the hypothesis, the research strategy and design for the research. The research methods that will be employed to gather the necessary information, followed by the data analysis methods, will also be discussed. At the end of the module, a brief statement about ethical issues at hand and a conclusive statement will be provided. WOMEN EMPOWERMENT AT A MANAGERIAL LEVEL IN UNITED KINGDOM: United Kingdom has been considered as a pioneering modern society that has embraced the changing societies and ideas; they are the prime example of a modern society. For the literature review to be objective and the research to be authentic, the sources that were used for the gathering of the theoretical material was done from scholarly articles and researches that have been conducted in the past. These researches substantiate the theory that there has been an increase in the development of women empowerment, especially in the Managerial level positions in the United Kingdom. There has been a spike in such a development in the past 10 years; showing that the laws, regulations and the society is doing something right to propagate such a behaviour in society. One needs to realize that it was not long before that women were not considered as men’s equals; there was a visible discrepancy between they was men were perceived against women. Women were not considered for strategically important positions in the past. The race towards the top for the women was slow and steady. Women have now reached an epitome of success; 15 out of 500 fortune companies have women CEO’s and this figure are expected to improve with each passing year (CNNMoney, 2010). In order to understand the causes and reasons for the increase in women empowerment, researches have been conducted in the past to see if literacy levels, understanding from the other gender, increase in the women’s career oriented personalities, their likelihood to come back to work after marriage and maternity. Research has shown that the increase in the inclination shown from the women to develop their career as seriously as men do, has increased the level of their competency and has made the opposite gender notice the increase in managerial capability. The work life balance of women has definitely increased over the years, now that they are given flexible work hours, and presence of child care options etc. This inclines the women to come back after childbirth and work full time, a phenomena that was not present about 20 years ago. Women working full time would become homemakers and stay back to take care of their children, leaving their careers behind. This is definitely changing today, increasing women participation in the managerial layer (Walby, 2002). There still exists a perception in the minds of the male gender, about the way women handle situations in managerial positions. It has been proven that women have a different management style than men and men mostly do not agree with that style as being as effective as their own. A recent study by Harvard Business Review has shown the majority of the male gender working in the management positions still undermines the visionary leadership qualities of women. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: A properly structured research methodology is tremendously important for the outcome of the research. For every hypothesis, the data that is needed to be collected requires a different set of tools, procedures and techniques. It is highly important to understand the kind of data that is required for the research so that the appropriate tool can be gauged. Methodology explains the methods that will be used, the tools that will be engaged in conducting the research so that the reader of the research has a proper idea of where the information came from and its originality and authenticity can be proved. Generally, a research is a blend of qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative research is the research which employs mathematical models to address hypotheses. It builds a relationship between observation and its mathematical representation in the world. Qualitative research, on the other hand, deals with the in-depth understanding of human behaviour by asking questions such as why and how. In simple terms, qualitative data means non-numerical data, whereas quantitative data means quantified numeric that are used for data analysis. For the purpose of this research, a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to ensure maximum acceptability of results. RESEARCH STRATEGY: The basic research strategy would encompass finding out the variables that are contributing to an increase in women empowerment in the business and management sector. The increased hike in women empowerment in the past decade is being created due to the presence of variable which were not present before. Former research shows various variables that are contributing to these phenomena. Some of these factors are work-life balance, women increasingly serious about their career, flex time options for working mothers, increased understanding from the opposite gender etc. Women today are being encouraged to develop a sound working career for themselves and their families; such encouragement stems from the fact that society as a whole is becoming more acceptable to such a work-life balance (George, 1998). This research will find out the impact of such variables and their perceived impact on the increased women empowerment across managerial level. One important aspect of this research is the fact that women empowerment has increased tremendously as a whole, this research pertains solely to the positions at the managerial level. This increase will definitely stem from the fact that women are now getting more acceptances from the opposite gender as a successful manager than before. Perceptions of the opposite gender play a gigantic role in such an increase. This research will focus on this aspect more than the others variables. Primary as well as secondary data will be consulted so that conclusive evidence can be found out at the end of the research (Mark, 2009). RESEARCH DESIGN: The research design is the blueprint of methods and tools which will be used to collect information for the research. There are three kinds of researches: exploratory, co relational and causal study; a co relational study identifies factors that lead to another situation or factors. The causal study identifies the cause and the effect relationship between two occurrences; it helps in the isolation of the dependent variable from the independent variable. The impact of presence of various factors on the increased women empowerment will be gauged, after they are identified through a series of literature researches and secondary data literature. For this purpose, the exploratory research method will be primarily used; the data collected from the exploratory research may be used for the development of a causal relationship between the factors identified. Exploratory research involved interviewing the subjects about their ideas; it can be through a face to face form like an interview or through extensive surveys being carried out. RESEARCH METHOD: This research is a comprehensive project. For the success of this research, already researched information will be used to guide the research in the right direction and then exploratory methods will be used to get primary data that can be eventually analyzed. The secondary research will be through evaluating and analyzing prior research present on this topic so that insights can be generated from the work of other researchers in the field to avoid redundancy. For this purpose a comprehensive literature review has already been prepared and analyzed (Mark, 2009). The primary research is the research that will be conducted by the researcher to understand the factors that are responsible for the increase in the phenomena under discussion. This will be done through pilot interviews, interviews, surveys etc from the sample and followed by appropriate data analysis. Since the data that needs to be extracted can only be done through exploratory techniques such as interviews and surveys, using other methods of research will not prove to be successful. For the preparation of literature review, case studies and other methods of research were used, making this project a complete blend of the right research tools or the right data need (George, 1998). CHOSEN SAMPLING METHOD: The sampling procedure forms a very important part of this research. In research, one cannot employ the whole target population to conduct the research on; therefore, representative samples are used that represent the whole population under question. If sampling method is not chosen with care, the whole research can be deemed invalid as the data was collected from a sample which was not representative of the target population. For the purpose of this research, stratified sampling technique will be used. In the stratified sampling techniques, sub groups will be investigated. The sub groups in this research will be the men and women present in the managerial position in United Kingdom. This will be done to get a view from both the stakeholders that determine the position of women in an organizational setting. DESIGN OF THE CHOSEN RESEARCH METHOD: The research instrument that is being used is a survey questionnaire that will be conducted through interviews and written surveys being awarded to the sample population. Since the people who are being interviewed belong to the management of organizations, a proper interview where the questions are administered face to face will provide us with a good pilot study where we can extract variables from the sources and then develop a mixed questionnaire. A mixed questionnaire will contain both open ended and closed ended questions and it will be administered to organizational management positions across United Kingdom (George, 1998). ETHICAL ISSUES CONSIDERED: There are several ethical issues that will be raised with the responses that will be collected from the people involved in this research. The gender issue will probably deflate the responses of the men to provide slightly changed answers. They might try to hide their true feelings about the competency of the women, owing to their perception as how it will be perceived by the researchers. The feelings of male domination and being better at what they do can fog up their true responses towards the research (Mark, 2009). On the other hand, when it comes to the other gender, women may be over emphasizing on the competency of women and how they are treated unfairly against men, to encourage an act of sympathy from the readers of the research. It will be made sure that the participation in this research will be voluntary participation, with an informed consent letter provided to each of the participants. The subjects will not be put at harm and they will be promised confidentiality. DATA ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE USED: After the data is collected, it will be processed through data analysis software so that a correlation between the variables and their dependency can be established. SPSS will serve as the best option in this scenario. For the open ended questions, the data will be symmetrised and presented in the research, serving as food for thought for other researchers who would continue to serve this important societal phenomenon with further research. BIBLIOGRAPHY Marcoulides, G. (1998). Modern methods of business research. Lawrence Erlbaum. Saunders, M., Lewis, P., Thornhill, A. (2009). Research Methods for Business Students. Pearson Education. CNNMoney.com. “Fortune 500: Women CEOs”. 20th November 2010. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2009/womenceos/ Walby, S., Olsen, W. “The Impact of Women’s position in the labour market on pay and implications for UK Productivity”. (November 2002). http://www.mbs.ac.uk/research/europeanemployment/conferenceseminars/documents/walbyolsenreport.pdf Read More