| Current Research Projects |
Intersections of Culture and Gender Differences in Negotiation
Research on youth unemployment in the Arab world has generally taken a ‘macro’ approach to analyzing trends in education and work. Most of these studies use labor force surveys and adopt traditional explanations, such as the ‘skills mismatch’ argument, to explain the low percentage of national graduates in the labor force. However, policy prescriptions to address the unemployment issue- from nationalization regulations to entrepreneurship programs- have proven to be of limited success in the UAE and many of its neighboring Gulf Cooperative Council countries. Moreover, these policy prescriptions are rarely gender sensitive and do not adequately address the unique challenges that young Emirati women face as they transition into a work environment.
Policies focusing on youth inclusion are likely to benefit if they reflected a better understanding of the ‘micro’ dynamics that underlie the school-to-work transition in the GCC, such as how young people are motivated and what sort of organizational conditions are needed to foster their successful entry into a work environment. Rather than presupposing that young national graduates are inherently deficient in skills or ill-suited to private sector employment, we start our investigation by dissecting the nature of the interaction between young graduates and employers through a series of studies on job negotiations in the GCC. In particular, we hope to address the gender gap in economic participation through a better understanding of the ways in which young women pursue resources and opportunities in organizations in the GCC.
This research project draws on gender in negotiation theory, which has been used to understand gender inequality in organizations, and cultural psychology theory, which takes into account the cultural appropriateness of our theoretical framework and methods. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, our cumulative findings will demonstrate how young men and women differ on a variety of questions relevant to the school-to-work transition, including the following: What matters to university gradates in a job negotiation situation? How are they perceived if they negotiate for training opportunities or salary adjustments? What information do graduates use in a negotiation situation? How does choice of language affect the negotiation outcome? How does segregation affect negotiator efficacy and negotiation outcomes?
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