Gender From the Perspective of Corporate Sustainability

Introduction

With the increasing globalization today, the performance of organizations is not only limited by economic criteria, but it is also evaluated through their responsibilities to the environment and society. Each organization is a member of a social environment as well as an economic one. As a corporate management approach, organizations should balance their economic goals with social and environmental goals to achieve corporate sustainability. Therefore, separate approaches for economic, social, and environmental goals in organizations should be united with a holistic perspective to achieve economic growth and sustainability by adapting to the constantly changing circumstances (Zink, 2007). For this purpose, organizations need to protect and strengthen their foundations in terms of economic, social, and environmental capital to achieve corporate sustainability.

Corporate sustainability, in other words, sustainability of organizations, is considered a developing management paradigm. As an alternative to the growth and profitability model of the tranditional approach, corporate sustainability considers social equality, justice, and environmental protection as much as profitability of the organization. According to this, both public institutions and businesses need to make positive discrimination for women and provide them work-life balance to benefit from the skills of their female employees. The fact that half of the population consists of women and that they do not take part in the senior management is a serious obstacle in the economic development of countries. As a matter of fact, the presence of women at the management level increases productivity through an increase in creativity and innovation, which provides organizations an important opportunity to improve the global image of their country. In addition, women's strong intuition, communication skills, empathy, patience, and tendency to compromise bring them into a different position than men in business life. While these characteristics of women can create great advantages in the business world, unfortunately this opportunity is not given to many women around the world.

In the laws of many developed and developing countries and international documents, there are provisions that require equal opportunities for all employees, regardless of gender, in all areas of business. However, it can be argued that business life is characterized by the ideologies of the powerful and ruling class through ongoing gender barriers (Hoober et al., 2010). In the literature on management, the informal glass ceiling, which cannot be easily revealed, prevents women from progressing to leadership positions regardless of their success. Even if women and men are endowed with the same human capital characteristics, it seems difficult for women to make progress in power hierarchies and benefit from social capital until the glass ceilings are abolished. Representation of women in management has become crucial for countries to become more democratized, achieve sustainable development, and create a workforce that respects human rights and utilizes the value of differences in today's globalization.