Gender Equality across Global Organizations: Towards a Framework for Increasing Gender Equality

Sammanfattning: The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze how Global Organizations work with Gender Equality, what type of challenges they experience and how they can be addressed. Secondarily, it addresses how Global Organizations can create an international Gender Equality strategy and how Gender Equality work differs among four countries. Earlier research has focused on gender equality as a stand-alone topic, and few models exist to incorporate such work in global organizations that efficiently manages to address the complexity of gender equality across varying cultures and business units. By surveying current research in gender equality, change management, and cultural management, this thesis proposes a framework for change that more adequately manages the inherently subjective nature of gender, together with the cross-cultural complexities of global organizations. The results, analysis, and discussion are based on a literature review enumerating the components of the synthesized framework and on interviews with two Swedish multinational companies, one construction company, and a mining company. Countries of interest are Czech Republic, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. Analyzed through this framework, the results indicate an increasing gap between different business units across the organizations, despite an overall increase of Gender Equality in total. The framework suggests that informal systems need to be addressed more explicitly and that centralized initiatives need to better account for geopolitical contexts to stay relevant when educating, informing and dictating change initiatives. The nature of the problem suggests it be managed by a shaping type of strategy with an emphasis on international networks dedicated to the issue. The similarities between Gender equality-specific models, selected change-models and cultural descriptive models indicate that there is possible to amalgamate insights from different academic fields more coherently. Utilizing the definition of gender and confirming the subjective nature of Gender Equalityissues leads to strategy models and cultural descriptions that - independent of Gender Equality work - confirm and strengthens the key takeaways from each model. The research shows that there are overlapping interests and areas of interest between academia and the industry, which is something that can be further developed.