A case study on the link of gender diversity towards organizational effectiveness

Abstract

Gender diversity especially in engineering field has been an interest in recent years. Studies claimed the benefit reaped with gender diversity is important in terms of growth of an organization such as the statistics from Credit Suisse on the number of women on the board which has shown upward trends on market shares. Institution of Engineers Malaysia (IEM) publication on the career success among engineers in Malaysia has made emphasis on the importance of women participation in the professional field especially among the decision makers. Other critical findings such as the majority of women feel welcome in the oil and gas industry and would encourage other females to join, however, 45% said they do not get the same recognition as men in terms of opportunities. Therefore, this paper attempts to investigate the perception of employees in an Oil and Gas company operating in Malaysia towards gender diversity and its relationship with attributes falling under Organizational Effectiveness by using a mixed method approach where samples selected for quantitative study were engineers from an oil and gas company. The findings indicated that there are positive perceptions from engineers regarding gender diversity, however implementation in the company is still lacking. The gap is identified and a framework is presented as an integrated approach to gender diversity and emphasize that the context could only be achieved if all aspects are carried out strategically in an organization, as a whole.