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The purpose of this paper is to develop a reliable and valid field survey research instrument to assess national cultural cognitive templates of preferred leader behaviour dimensions to facilitate education, development, and training of managerial leaders operating across diverse organisations.

The study consists of focus group evaluations of the validity and the translations to local languages of a survey instrument assessing leader behaviour preferences in business organisations.

The studies find that the survey instrument and its translations are valid and reliable for assessing preferred leader behaviour across national cultures. The length of the survey is problematic, and a new project is underway to produce a shorter version with equivalent reliability and validity.

As the research project is long term, at this point, a relatively long survey is available for research, with a shorter version planned for the future.

Practical implications include producing and validating a field survey research instrument that is reliable and valid across cultures and languages, and can be employed to improve the understanding, development, and education of managers and leaders of international business organisations.

Management and leadership processes are employed in all aspects of life, and can be better understood and improved through this research project.

The majority of cross-cultural research is leader-centric studies of implicit leader characteristics; this project expands the scope of studies further into follower-centric studies of observed leader behaviour.

This paper aims to present a meta‐analysis of available statistical data and literature for gender‐related practices concerning women in business and education across countries, comparing the patriarchal belt and South Asian countries in the belt to the rest of the world. The purpose of the project is to investigate the progress of enhancement of opportunities for women to engage in non‐agricultural work in the belt, and, as women’s participation in tertiary education is touted as an impetus in enhancing women’s opportunities, investigate its effect.

The existence of a belt of countries from North Africa through Bangladesh and rural China is well known, with societies demonstrating a consistent pattern of restriction and suppression of women. No development of theory treating the patriarchal belt as a whole has been published. The authors earmark this as a future endeavour. They employ ten years of statistical summaries of percent of women in the non‐agricultural labour force and ratios of women to men in tertiary education provided by the United Nations in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals to compare changes in these activities in countries in the patriarchal belt, South Asia, and the rest of the world. The method is to carry out statistical comparisons of trends derived from annual averages for the two measures.

The literature review indicates that for millennia in the patriarchal belt societal practices have institutionalised women’s lack of access to participation in the labour market and generally from participating in much of public life. The analyses indicate that participation in non‐agricultural employment has decreased over the past decade in the belt compared to the rest of the world. Opportunities for women to participate in tertiary education have on average been increasing during this period for most countries of the world including those in the patriarchal belt. However, this circumstance has not led to increased participation in the non‐agricultural work force.

The practical implications seen are that the UN Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) are important to improving the lot of individuals, some goals that purport to lead to improvements in human and gender rights in regions such as the patriarchal belt may have no real effect, and other, more useful goals need to be investigated. Economically, the exclusion of women from voluntary productive labour as detrimental to the development of a nation is seen.

In the patriarchal belt societal practices institutionalise negative discrimination concerning women, often codified in laws that prohibit women from participating in much of public life or fully competing in the labour market. The evaluation of these conditions using European and North American standards proposes that these women are abused and denied their rights. Nonetheless, initiatives such as agreements on the UNMDG appear to have no effect, and other solutions need to be pursued.

The originality and value of this paper is that it investigates the complete set of patriarchal belt countries, across countries that include both Muslim and Hindu majorities. It concludes that while religions tenets are employed to justify patriarchal practices, long‐standing tribal practices appear to be far more influential.

The purpose of this paper is to address issues relating to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UNMDG) in the Middle East, analysing socio‐cultural issues having direct relevance to the region's progress toward “Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women”.

The authors employ meta‐analyses with data from the United Nations, the Arab Human Development Report, and various sources of measurement of national means for Hofstede's five‐dimensional model of cultural value.

The authors find that the percentage of women in employment, excluding the agricultural sector, in their sample of Middle East countries has declined since 2000, while in the samples of other Muslim‐majority and all other countries the percentage employed has increased.

The limitations of the authors' research are that complete sets of data for women in employment are not available for all years for all countries in their samples.

Implications for practice for governments and businesses in Middle East countries are that women are a valuable economic resource which is being excluded from contribution and for the past decade the change in the Middle East has been in a negative direction.

The economic contributions and rights of women in the Middle East lag behind most of the developed and developing nations, including other Muslim‐majority nations.

This study provides empirical evidence from publicly available data concerning the employment status of women in Middle Eastern nations. The authors found no similar empirical studies in the literature. The study is of value to planners and policy‐makers in business, government, and non‐governmental organisations.