Our efforts here represent an exploratory attempt to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of gender and organizational culture. In doing so, we report on a wide-ranging survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (men and women) in the US. We asked survey participants about their general beliefs regarding culture, as well as their specific experiences in the work place with cultures and leaders. Because of its importance in cultural management, we also asked about participants’ beliefs concerning, and experiences in, the employee hiring process. In all of these analyses, we highlight the differences between self-identifying men and women. Because those holding managerial positions likely think about, and experience, culture differently than non-manager employees, and because men tend to be more highly represented in managerial positions, we also control statistically for managerial status in assessing gender differences.
The paper is structured as follows. We briefly review several strands of related research on gender and culture-linked topics. We then describe some of the theoretical issues we see as pertinent to the gender-culture question, resulting not in hypotheses or arguments but rather as empirical queries for exploration. We then discuss the survey we conducted and the methods we used. Following that, we present the findings. We conclude with some discussion of what we see as potentially promising directions for future research on gender and culture.