Gendered Decision Making

The decision-making process is critical across all levels of interpersonal relationships and leadership. It is a process through which leaders come against various forms of interest, to take responsibility for future events. As such, every person takes responsibility for their future and their significant others through decision making. When fairly unwanted outcomes arise, or failure to attain expected outcomes arise, those responsible are considered bad decision-makers. That has become a baseline for judging good and bad decision-makers, with reference to various individual circumstances. This paper identifies that there is an ongoing debate that clusters good and bad decision-makers based on gender. For instance, a Harvard Business Review article explained that women are better decision-makers in boosting sensitivity (Benko & Pelster, 2013). For such reasons, studies have found that marketers are segmenting consumer ads through gendered decision-making styles (Mehta, 2020). However, the decision-making styles are general and are seldom explicitly defined in terms of gender. Thus, this paper seeks to identify whether there a gender difference in decision-making style.

A decision-making style is a tool that helps individuals and teams to gain insight to process their decisions. There are five main decision-making styles namely rational, intuitive, spontaneous, avoidant, and dependent decision-making styles (Delaney, Strough, Parker & Bruine de Bruin, 2015). Some scholars such as Jankelová (2017) have argued that decision making is strategic, as it involves making deliberate choices. In that perspective, decision-making styles are immune to the individuality of the decision-maker. Nevertheless, not all decision-making processes are similar, as they entail spectrums such as structure versus ambiguity, and task versus social. Concerning the latter, the nature of a task and the person’s social perception are likely to influence their decision-making style and societal feedback. For instance, studies have found that women are either discriminated against or avoid dangerous, sensitive, or high-profile jobs (Brands & Fernandez-Mateo, 2017; Paker, 2018). Nevertheless, few women have risen to top positions academically, politically, economically, and other areas. Thus, the guiding questions will focus on finding whether there are any differences between the decision making styles between males and females,  it will probe whether there are predominant decisions making styles for both genders and lastly, whether there are statistically significant differences between decisions made by both genders using the same decision-making style.

This study is significant as it will help to deconstruct any stereotypes affecting the performance of either gender and their styles in the decision-making process. It will analyze each style’s decision-making process with respect to each gender and identify any statistically significant differences and or implications. That way, this study will utilize semi-structured interviews to collect data regarding decision making styles for 20 people, ten males and ten females recruited from a population of 200 people invited through emails. It will be an online survey for less than twenty minutes, identifying the participants’ demographic details and decision-making styles. The decision-making style’s data will be obtained using Scott & Bruce’s (1995) General Decision-Making Styles Inventory (GDMSI) to measure participants’ decision-making through the semi-structured questions for each style. The validity of their response will be found using Scott & Bruce’s (1995) factor analytic procedure to identify the reliability of the respaces for both samples (male and female participants). Besides, they will use a five-point Likert scale to tell how some interview statements describe them, with 1 – strongly disagree, and 5 – strongly agree.

References

Benko, C., & Pelster, B. (2013). How Women Decide. Retrieved 19 September 2020, from https://hbr.org/2013/09/how-women-decide

Brands, R., & Fernandez-Mateo, I. (2017). Women Are Less Likely to Apply for Executive Roles If They’ve Been Rejected Before. Retrieved 19 September 2020, from https://hbr.org/2017/02/women-are-less-likely-to-apply-for-executive-roles-if-theyve-been-rejected-before

Delaney, R., Strough, J., Parker, A., & Bruine de Bruin, W. (2015). Variations in decision-making profiles by age and gender: A cluster-analytic approach. Personality And Individual Differences, 85, 19-24. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.034

Jankelová, N. (2017). Strategic Decision Making and Its Importance in Small Corporations. Corporate Governance And Strategic Decision Making. doi: 10.5772/intechopen.68858

Mehta, R. (2020). Gender-based differences in consumer decision-making styles: implications for marketers. DECISION. doi: 10.1007/s40622-020-00252-8

Paker, K. (2018). Gender discrimination more common for women in mostly male workplaces. Retrieved 19 September 2020, from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/07/women-in-majority-male-workplaces-report-higher-rates-of-gender-discrimination/

Scott, S., & Bruce, R. (1995). Decision-Making Style: The Development and Assessment of a New Measure. Educational And Psychological Measurement, 55(5), 818-831. doi: 10.1177/0013164495055005017