Do female/male distinctions in language matter? Evidence from gender political quotas

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“…Apart (Santacreu-Vasut et al 2013). Panel C of Table 2 lists some examples of English and German WALS features.…”

Section: Linguistic Approaches: the Tree And The Wals Measurementioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic barriers in the destination language acquisition of immigrants

Isphording

Otten

2014

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

106

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“…As discussed in the previous section, this measure has been used by economists Santacreu-Vasut et al, 2013); Hicks et al, 2015;Gay et al, 2016Gay et al, , 2017 to document that women who live in countries where the grammar is gender-based face stronger barriers to economic participation and are more likely to behave according to traditional gender norms of behaviour.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Givati and Troiano (2012) use gender marking in pronouns as an instrumental variable for maternity leave laws. Gay et al (2013) show that women who live in countries where grammar is sex-based face barriers in accessing labour, land, and credit markets, and Santacreu-Vasut et al, (2013) find that these women face barriers in the implementation of gender political quotas. Hicks et al (2015) show that migrant households that speak languages with sexbased grammar are more likely to allocate household labour on the basis of gender.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Among the grammatical features of language that has received considerable attention from economists, gender distinctions in grammar figure prominently. These distinctions have been shown to correlate with inferior socioeconomic, political and managerial outcomes for women at the country level (Givati and Troiano (2012), Santacreu-Vasut et al, (2013), Santacreu-Vasut et al (2014), Mavisakalyan (2015)). Hicks et al (2015) show that these patterns also exist at the individual level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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New avenues of research to explain the rarity of females at the top of the accountancy profession

Jeny¹,

Santacreu-Vasut²

2017

Palgrave Commun

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The rarity of females in leadership positions has been an important subject of study in economics research. The existing research on gender inequality has established that important variations exist across time and place and that these differences are partly attributable to the cultural differences regarding gender roles. The accounting research has also established that women are rarely promoted to the top of the Big Four audit firms (KPMG, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young). However, the majority of research in accountancy has focused on Anglo-Saxon contexts (the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia) or country case studies without explicitly considering the role that cultural variations may play. Because the Big Four are present in more than 140 countries, we argue that the accountancy research that attempts to explain gender disparities at the top of these organizations would benefit from considering cultural factors. Such research, however, faces a key methodological challenge-specifically, the measurement of the cultural dimensions that relate to gender. To address this challenge, we propose an emerging approach that uses the gender distinctions in language to measure cultural attitudes toward gender roles. The idea that language may capture gender roles and even influence their formation and persistence has been the focus of emerging research in linguistics and economics. To support our proposition, we follow two steps. First, we review the accounting research by performing a systematic query on the bibliographic databases of the accounting articles that study gender and language. Second, we present data regarding the diversity of the global boards of the Big Four and the diversity of the linguistic environments in which they operate. We find that half of the countries where the Big Four are present exhibit a sex-based grammatical system for their most-spoken language, while the other half of the countries do not exhibit this system. Our findings suggest that the use of language as a measure of culture is a novel approach in accounting research. We conclude by emphasizing some potential directions for future research, namely, studying the linguistic determinants of the rarity of females at the top of audit firms and exploring accountancy practices in countries with linguistically diverse environments, such as Canada or Belgium, among others. This article is published as part of a collection on the role of women in management and the workplace.

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“…The linguistic gender marking gap is calculated based on the Gender Intensity Index (GII) presented at length by Santacreu-Vasut et al (2013) and Santacreu-Vasut et al (2014).…”

Section: Gender Intensity Index Gapmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic gender marking gap and female staffing at MNC’s

Malul

Shoham

Uddin

2016

The International Journal of Human Resource Management

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This paper presents the impact of the linguistic gender marking gap on expatriate female staffing decisions in a multinational company. Transaction cost theory postulates that due to cultural differences, integration between parent and subsidiary companies becomes complex and costly. However, staffing from parent organisations could be helpful to minimise the cultural conflict by establishing better control and hence reducing the transaction cost. Language is considered one of the major components that shapes culture, and linguistic gender marking gap could cause a difference in attitude towards male and female staff members from parent companies.Due to the nature of linguistic structures, which are embedded in ancestral culture and have a cognitive effect on speakers, the gap has two levels. The first is the gap between home and host countries' languages. The second is between the official and informal languages used by the headquarters and the subsidiary. The analytical model, using an innovative gender gap variable, supports two carefully developed propositions, that the success of expatriate staffing at managerial level depends on the linguistic gender marking gap between home and host country, and that use of organisational language in subsidiaries reduces the linguistic gender marking gap between them.2

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Do female/male distinctions in language matter? Evidence from gender political quotas

Cited by 61 publications

References 8 publications

Linguistic barriers in the destination language acquisition of immigrants

Linguistic barriers in the destination language acquisition of immigrants

New avenues of research to explain the rarity of females at the top of the accountancy profession

Linguistic gender marking gap and female staffing at MNC’s

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