Workers' attitudes toward women managers: evidence from Vietnam

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-08-2021-0215
• Published date: 22 August 2022
• Date: 22 August 2022
• Pages: 53-69
• Subject Matter: HR & organizational behaviour,Employment law,Diversity,equality,inclusion
• Author: Anh T. Phan,Hannah-Hanh D. Nguyen

Workers’attitudes toward women

managers: evidence from Vietnam

Anh T. Phan and Hannah-Hanh D. Nguyen

Department of Management and Industrial Relations, Shidler College of Business,

University of Hawai’iatM



anoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Abstract

Purpose –The purpose of this paper was to investigate personality-related antecedents of Vietnamese

workers’attitudes toward female managers, which subsequently predicted workers’judgments of them.

Design/methodology/approach –This study used a factorial experiment to examine participants’general

attitudes toward women’s rights and roles and their particular attitudes toward female managers in the

workplace. Vietnamese workers (N5159) were randomly assigned to experimental conditions of manager

performance and completed a post-test questionnaire. This study also qualitatively explored participants’

observations of any gender stereotypes in the workplace.

Findings –Findings demonstrated that participants’gender, general attitudes toward women’s social rights

and roles, and internal work locus of control positively predicted their attitudes toward female managers.

Qualitative findings showed perceived gender-based egalitarianism in the workplace, but women’s leadership

qualities were barely recognized.

Originality/value –This study is the first to utilize a mixed-method approach to assess Vietnamese workers’

attitudes, contributing to the literature on attitudes toward both women in general and women in management

in Asia generally and in Vietnam in particular.

Keywords Performance evaluation, Gender differences, Attitudes toward women managers, Attitudes

toward women’s roles, Vietnamese employees

Paper type Research paper

Does one’s attitude toward women in general predict one’s attitude toward women as

managers in an Asian work setting? Do these attitudes consequently affect one’s judgments

of female managers’work-related outcomes? Leadership is often regarded as a traditionally

and predominantly male role (Heilman, 2012;Koenig et al., 2011). A typical leader position is

associated with more masculine attributes (Schein, 2001), which may affect one’s attitude

toward women as managers. Despite the body of studies on antecedents of attitudes toward

female managers, there is a lack of research that links attitudes toward women’s general roles

to those toward female managers. Further, there has not been any study to date that explicitly

investigates those relationships and work-related outcomes in Vietnam, a paradoxical Asian

country as far as women’s roles and rights are concerned. Our study with a mixed-method

approach filled in these gaps in the literature.

Using the role congruity theory (Eagly and Karau, 2002) and the social role theory

(Heilman, 2012), we investigated this phenomenon using a sample of Vietnamese workers.

The experiment’s goals were two-fold. First, we examined workers’general attitudes toward

Vietnamese women’s social rights and roles as a predictor of their attitudes toward women as

managers in organizational settings. Second, we explored whether those attitudes influenced

Vietnamese workers’preference of male managers over female ones, as well as some relevant

work outcomes.

Attitudes

toward women

managers

53

The research was partially funded by Hannah-Hanh D. Nguyen’s International Pre-Dissertation

Research Fellowship granted by the Social Science Research Council, New York.

The authors have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/2040-7149.htm

Received 31 August 2021

Revised 2 April 2022

Accepted 14 July 2022

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion:

An International Journal

Vol. 42 No. 1, 2023

pp. 53-69

© Emerald Publishing Limited

2040-7149

DOI 10.1108/EDI-08-2021-0215

Literature review

Research context

A Southeast Asian country, Vietnam has a complex historical background and mixed socio-

cultural influences, which uniquely colors people’s perceptions of female workers. On the one

hand, the country inherits the Confucian legacy from China, favoring men over women in

general (Do and Brennan, 2015). On the other hand, Vietnamese women are recognized for

their contributions to the country’s socioeconomic revivals (B

elanger, 2018). Women account

for nearly half of the total workforce in Vietnam (47.8%; General Statistics Office of Vietnam,

2018), a significant increase in the number of female workers since the 1986 economic reform

that has transitioned the country to a socialist-oriented market economy and paved the way

for national initiatives to overcome gender inequality in the workplace (UN Women, 2018).

However, Vietnamese women are still less likely to receive the same opportunities to advance

in leadership roles compared to men (World Economic Forum, 2021).

Socially, Vietnamese women are traditionally bounded by the Confucian concept of “Tam

T

ong, TứÐức”(i.e. Three Obediences and Four Virtues), pressuring them to fulfill multiple

traditionally deemed roles such as taking care of family responsibilities and supporting their

husbands (Nguyen, 2014;Pham-Thi et al., 2019). Even though the government seems to

advocate for women’s rights, Vietnam still enforces a double-standard social pressure for

women to perform well at work and at home—“the second shift”as coined by Hochschild and

Machung (2012), which is apparent in the national slogan of “Gi

ỏ

iviệcnước, dảmviệcnh



a”

(good at national affairs and good at domestic affairs) endorsed by the Vietnamese General

Confederation of Labor (2010). Furthermore, the Law on Social Insurance mandates a

retirement age of 55 for female laborers, as opposed to the age of 60 for males (National

Assembly of Vietnam, 2014), preventing women from earning a living within the formal

sector of the economy several years earlier than men. However, even some women believe the

early retirement policy is a privilege for them (Truong, 2008), indicating that Vietnamese

women psychologically adopt and internalize benevolent institutional sexism themselves

(Pham-Thi et al., 2019). In sum, even though Vietnamese women participate almost equally in

the nation’s workforce, they have been discriminated socially, organizationally, and

psychologically.

Attitude toward women managers

One’s attitude toward women in managerial roles might be rooted in one’s cognitive

judgements of women’s rights and roles (e.g. in vocations and marital relationships), which is

connected to overt sexism (McLaughlin and Aikman, 2019) and subsequently predicts one’s

behaviors toward women (Deaux and Major, 1987). Particularly, Schein (1973) introduced the

“think manager—think male”effect: a typical leader possessing more masculine attributes

and being linked more strongly to the male gender stereotype. This effect has been replicated

in Asian countries such as China and Japan (see a review by Schein, 2001).

Early studies of gender differences in workers’attitudes toward women in managerial

roles (e.g. Matteson, 1976;Peters et al., 1974) evidenced that American men hold less favorable

attitude toward female managers than did women, a finding that still prevails in the 21st

century in the Western world (e.g. Cordano et al., 2002;Liu and Wilson, 2001). Braun et al.

(2017) recently examined gender bias in implicit followership theories, and found that women

are strongly associated with a follower role in contrast to a manager role, and that men are

implicitly favored in leadership roles.

Although there is no direct research on Vietnamese workers’attitudes toward women in

managerial roles, gender research in Vietnam shows general gender inequality in terms of

leadership opportunities. For example, Dang (2017) conducted in-depth interviews with mid-

and top-level women leaders at four higher education institutions in Southern Vietnam and

EDI

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