Good Employment Discrepancies Between Genders In Europe Research Proposal Example

Legal Provisions and Quotas in Corporate Boards

In both Norway and France, the government has instituted a number of new rules regarding the representation of women in the workforce. Frustrated that there have not been enough women in the upper echelons of business, the French and Norwegian governments have both decided that the best way to handle these discrepancies in employment numbers between men and women is to enforce quotas at the highest levels of business. Businesses operating in France and Norway now must have a certain percentage of the members of a board of directors for any given business as women. This is designed to offset the long-standing inequalities that women face in the highest levels of the business world.
These quotas are much more common in Europe than they are around the rest of the world. France, Norway, Italy, and even Germany have all instituted some kind of rules regarding the representation of women in the corporate world; for many of these countries, the goal is to have women representing a quarter of the members on corporate boards as quickly as possible.
Some of these countries have instituted laws regarding how many women should be represented in any given boardroom at any given time—others have merely pointed out the inequality, and prompted the companies within their borders to implement voluntary quotas. However, the two countries that will be discussed in depth here—Norway and France—have both instituted serious, legal quotas with serious consequences if the standards are not met in the near future.

Research: Sources and Information

Because this is a relatively new issue, there are many different places to find information. There are a multitude of news stories on the topic of quotas in the workplace, particularly when it comes to quotas and gender; it is a very controversial issue, so many people are writing about the topic. However, just because many people are writing about the topic does not mean that the information is going to be particularly good information. For this reason, it is important to maintain good discretionary reading when looking at articles about this topic. Many, if not most of the “news” articles on the topic of quotas in the workplace are heavily biased.
Because of this bias, the best place to look for information on this topic is in peer-reviewed journals. Biased information can be very important, because it can give good information regarding the arguments surrounding a controversial topic like quotas; however, unbiased information and research is equally important. There is no real long-term research that has been done on the topic because it is still such a new concept and idea that has been implemented by these governments, but there is some research that has been done, and this research is all contained within a number of different peer-reviewed journals.
Once the information necessary for this project has been compiled, it will be analyzed, particularly to address it for bias. If there is a lot of statistical evidence, then that evidence will also be followed, to determine if there is a statistical link between the success of a business and the diversity of its board. It is unclear whether there are any such links, but statistics in these unbiased journals will provide the answers moving forwards.

Conducting Original Research

The original research that will be done on this particular topic will center quite heavily around the perception of women and the impact of quotas on the workforce in Norway and France. In Norway and France today, there are gender quotas that dictate how many women must serve on a board; these quotas have brought about significant change in the business world in these areas. However, there are bad changes that inevitably came with the good; the sheer number of women who have had to be hired into these positions without a doubt has influenced the labor market in these countries.
This research will aim to determine whether or not the labor market in France and Norway has changed, and to what extent it has changed; the information gathered will have to do with the number of women hired, as well as the number of men hired, and the trends that have begun to show in the region. In addition to looking at overall hiring trends, this research will also examine the perceptions of people in the market, and how they feel about their likelihood of getting a job that suits their abilities and education levels.
This will be done through an analysis of the statistics available though a number of recent censuses, as well as a program and survey that has been designed to sample random people in the population and ask their opinion on these matters. This sample will be asked about gender quotas, and how they feel that these gender quotas have impacted their ability to be hired for one position or another.

Predictions for Research Results

This research has the potential to be quite surprising in its results, because gender quotas in business are relatively new things. For many years, business has relied on other factors to make the decision of whom to hire; sometimes these factors were blatantly discriminatory, while at other times, they were not. However, the new rules regarding quotas has forced companies to accept that they are undervaluing female employees in a very significant way, and has placed significant demand on these businesses to ensure that they rectify this problem in the near future.
In this research, the researchers are hoping to track trends between male and female employment and employment opportunities in France and Norway. These trends will be tracked and then compared to previous trends in these nations, in the hopes of discovering a link between gender quotas and employment prospects in people of both genders.
Because of the upward trend in highly-educated, highly-motivated women who are flooding the market, the researchers expect to see that there are more women being hired in the marketplace than men. This may be due in part to the quotas, but it may also have to do with the fact that women are paid less than a man for doing the same job with the same level of skill. While this is slowly being rectified, this is still a real concern in the job market; in short, women are cheaper to employ than men, many of whom are willing to ask for more money from employers to ensure that they are being fairly compensated for their work. Women are less likely to negotiate, and it is this trend that the researchers expect to witness in the accumulation of data.

Primary and Secondary Sourcing

Primary sources are nearly always superior to secondary sources when it comes to doing and conducting research. This is because primary sources are providing the researcher with information that has not necessarily been analyzed; it is frequently from a source that was present at an event or has some kind of fundamental link to the event itself. For instance, a primary source would be survey results regarding the perception of women in the business world in France. The secondary source, then, would be the paper that the researcher would then write about those perceptions, using the primary sources that he or she obtained to reach conclusions about the nature of the business world in France.
This is, of course, only an example regarding the nature of primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources do have their place in research; experts who are conducting analyses on extremely complex or difficult topics are often excellent secondary sources that can be used to inform the conclusions that a researcher is making about the situation or research question that he or she has presented. Secondary sources should never be ignored or forgotten merely because there are primary sources available. Both of these types of sources present something important to the researcher, and the wise researcher utilizes both types of sources and acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of both types of research sources. In an ideal situation, the researcher would use both primary sources and secondary sources to conduct his or her research, which would ensure overall success and variability within the results obtained and the analyses completed.

References

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