Men and Women in Management: The Myths Continue

Today women are held back, not by incompetence or inadequacies, but rather by the myths and social constructions surrounding them as women. The myths American society holds about sex and gender hinder women from obtaining equality in the workplace. Myths are very powerful tools. They allow a society, or in this case an organization, to justify its past and present actions and to predict its future behaviors. Myths provide a sense of identity and are tied to emotion; therefore, it is not possible to dispel them by empirical data alone. In order for a myth to change, the feelings of those who believe that myth must be changed. Before women in managerial positions are allowed to advance in their positions as fast as their male counterparts, our society, American organizations, and men and women of the organization must change their myths. Discrimination in the workplace will cease only when current gender myths are made illegitimate and replaced with new myths more representative of women\u27s and men\u27s equality

Universal Versus Islamic Human Rights: A Clash of Cultures or a Clash with a Construct?

This article examines the recent trend proposing that Islam and Islamic culture mandate a distinctive approach to human rights. It offers critical assessments of selected civil and political rights in two recent products of this trend: (1) the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, issued by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and endorsed by Iran and Saudi Arabia; and (2) the rights provisions in the Saudi Arabian Basic Law promulgated in 1992. These legislative initiatives will be examined in conjunction with constructs of an Islamic culture necessarily at odds with international human rights norms. These constructs have been put forward not only by Westerners influenced by Orientalist stereotypes or attracted to a cultural relativist approach to rights questions, but also by spokespersons for Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the forefront of the campaign to persuade international opinion that Islam mandates a distinctive approach to rights issues. The constructs of Islamic rights that have been offered by Muslims who reject the universality of civil and political rights - set forth in the International Bill of Human Rights - will be contrasted with the views of Muslims who advocate the universality of human rights and who are inclined to view governmental rights policies as deriving from political, and not cultural, considerations. An examination going beyond the official rhetoric about Islamic human rights reveals that there is no real consensus on the part of Muslims that their religion mandates a culturally distinctive approach to rights or that it precludes the adoption of international human rights norms. In fact, the relationship of Islamic culture to the positions that Muslims inside and outside governments are currently articulating on human rights is neither a simple nor a direct one, and the range of Muslims\u27 attitudes on human rights defies Orientalist stereotypes and facile generalizations about a supposedly monolithic Islamic culture

Disentangeling gut feeling: Assessing the integrity of social entrepreneurs

This paper analyzes how social investors evaluate the integrity of social entrepreneurs. Based on an experiment with 40 professionals and 40 students, we investigate how five attributes of the entrepreneur contribute to the assessment of integrity. These attributes are the entrepreneur's personal experience, professional background, voluntary accountability efforts, reputation and awards/fellowships granted to the entrepreneur. We find that social investors focus largely on voluntary accountability efforts of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur's reputation when judging integrity. For an overall positive judgment of integrity, it was sufficient if either reputation or voluntary accountability efforts of the entrepreneur were high. By comparing professionals with students, we show that experience leads to a simpler decision model focusing on key attributes. --social entrepreneur,social investor,integrity,conjoint analysis,venture philanthropy