Factors Affecting Gender Diversity Amongst Corporate Leadership in Malaysia Mediated by Gender Discrimination

Ng, Felicia Weng Ji (2021) Factors Affecting Gender Diversity Amongst Corporate Leadership in Malaysia Mediated by Gender Discrimination. Final Year Project (Masters), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

A key challenge for Malaysian companies today is to practice gender diversity. Organisations should attract and retain qualified women to sit in managerial positions of organisations. Since women make up more than half of the population in Malaysia, it is necessary to implement gender diversity and inclusion initiative to facilitate gender diversity in corporate leadership. Malaysia is moving towards developed country status. In order to increase women’s participation rate in leadership positions is Malaysian companies, it is essential to analyse the barriers that most women encounter in advancing their career path. The objective of this study is to analyse the factors or barriers such as gender discrimination, corporate culture, glass-ceiling effect and work-family conflict towards gender diversity practice in Malaysian companies. This study also intends to identify whether government intervention will have an effect on increasing gender diversity within Malaysian corporations. There is a total of nine research questions and hypotheses developed and tested to achieve the objectives of this research. This research adopts the quantitative research method with a cross-sectional design and online survey method for data collection. A total sample of 237 was collected from employees who are currently working in Malaysia and the data collected were analysed using the SPSS and SmartPLS software. The research findings revealed that corporate culture, gender discrimination, glass-ceiling effect are significantly negatively related to gender diversity. As for the mediating hypotheses, gender discrimination partially mediates the relationship between glassceiling effect and work-family conflict. Further, it was revealed that gender discrimination does not mediate the relationship between government intervention and gender diversity. The contributions of this research to future researchers and employers were highlighted as well. Moreover, the limitations of this research have been identified and recommendations were suggested for further improvement in for future research