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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 offer an editorial introduction to the special issue on “Gender and diversity in organizations in South Asia”.

The paper reviews the state of extant research on equality, diversity and inclusion in South Asia. It also offers an overview of the papers included in the special issue and the unique contributions they make to this field of knowledge.

Findings vary for each paper; however, overall, the special issue brings to the fore theoretical ideas, alternative organizing and organisations and challenges involved in diversity management in South Asia.

The papers offer fresh insights in theorizing and managing diversity and equality which depart from the dominant Anglo‐centric theorizations in this field.

Educators, policy makers and managers in organisations may take into account various findings and recommendations offered in the papers leading to greater awareness of the challenges and opportunities to formulate context‐sensitive policies and practices of diversity in South Asia.

Barring a few exceptions, the topic of gender and diversity management in South Asia, as for example the centrality of national culture and values, remains generally ignored in work and organization studies. Papers that are published appear in a wide variety of journals rarely achieving a critical mass. The current (special) issue of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion addresses these gaps and seeks to strengthen understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion pertaining to the region classified as South Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the state of affairs in the Sultanate of Oman for the presence (or absence) of women in senior and managerial roles in private companies. The study also investigates where women are located within the organisations (e.g. as board members, chief officers, vice presidents, top management, division or unit heads).

This is a quantitative study that analysed gender in the largest 122 private and publicly listed organisations in Oman. The study is based on data available from the Zawya database that tracks information about companies in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Women are employed in Oman in small numbers when compared with the number of men. Women remain extremely underrepresented in senior roles in Omani organisations currently. Women are found slightly (but not significantly) more in departmental management roles (particularly in human resource management, marketing/communication, public relations, and project management) and in the transport and finance industries.

The Zawya database did not contain complete data on each company analysed. Hence, this is a descriptive study and lacked advanced statistical techniques for comparison and relationship analysis.

This study increases the academic knowledge on international issues in gender and management. The study also provides insights for government leaders, educators, and scholars who work to help prepare women for leadership in this region.

This is one of the first scholarly studies conducted on the presence of women in senior positions and management within Oman. It adds value as it is the first study to compare gender in management across roles, industrial classification, size of company, and ownership.

The purpose is to outline and illustrate the economic theory of parental self‐interest and its implications for the entitlements of children according to their gender, and using empirical data, to determine the extent to which the theory is reflected in discrimination of parents against female siblings in different communities in eastern India.

Using economic analysis, this paper outlines and illustrates the basis of the economics of parental discrimination against female children and structured questionnaires are used to collect data from village rural wives in the Santal tribal belt of West Bengal and in Orissa in Kondh‐dominated village to determine the extent to which economics explains parental discrimination between daughters and sons. The selection of the areas has been done on the basis that their different cultural dimensions may affect parental attitudes to female children. The statistical significance of differences in responses between the West Bengal sample and that from Orissa is tested using the chi‐squared test. Implications of the results for theory of parental discrimination between siblings according to their gender are outlined.

It is found that parental discrimination in favour of boys and against girls is much more marked in the Santal‐dominated belt of West Bengal than in the Kondh‐dominated villages of Orissa, where it is absent or virtually so. This is the case despite similar economic conditions and the fact that all the sampled villagers are relatively poor. Differences in cultural values seem to explain the difference.

Results could be strengthened by using a similar questionnaire to survey wives in additional villages in the Santal tribal‐belt of West Bengal and in more Kondh‐dominated villages in Orissa, as well as in other cultural contexts. Furthermore, families in these areas are patriarchal. It would be interesting to obtain results also from Indian communities that have matriarchal families as in parts of Meghalaya.

The findings support the view that the behaviour of parents towards children (according to their gender or otherwise) is a combined result of personal parental goals, social structures and cultural values. Economic theories of the family are likely to be too narrow and may be misleading in their predictions unless they take into account the institutional and cultural contexts in which families exist.

Informed by the role congruity theory of prejudice towards female leaders, this paper aims to review the literature on gender and leadership to consolidate existing theory development, stimulate new thinking and provide a framework for future empirical studies. It offers a theoretical framework to understand what may prevent or facilitate the emergence of female leaders.

The paper reviews and synthesises recent research on the linkages between gender and leadership.

The review extends Eagly and Karau’s (2002) role congruity theory by identifying additional constructs that may alleviate negative prejudicial evaluations and offering new insights into the potential alignment between feminine traits and leadership success.

The theoretical framework that emerged in this paper may be used as a heuristic model to contextually examine the lack of female leaders.

The paper proposes a theoretical framework to understand issues related to the emergence of female leaders. It offers news insights into possible alignment in female-leader role stereotypes that may address prejudicial evaluations against female leaders.

In the U.S.A. we would call it the ‘Bible Belt’. A wisecracker in Oslo might call it den Morke Stripen, ‘the Dark Strip’. It is a strip of counties down the south‐west coast and around the south‐east coast of Norway, the stronghold of the Christian People's Party and of the powerful volunteer organization of fundamentalists, Indremisjonen (the Inner Mission). In the valleys and coasts of Norway the traditional Lutheran family patterns persist—patriarchal but not authoritarian—and provide a background of stability in the families of modern industrial and more worldly Oslo. There are few divorces in the provincial areas.

To reexamine the Weber Thesis pertaining to the relationship between ascetic Protestantism – especially Calvinism – and modern capitalism, as between an economic “spirit” and an economic “structure,” in which the first is assumed to be the explanatory factor and the second the dependent variable.

The chapter provides an attempt to combine theoretical-empirical and comparative-historical approaches to integrate theory with evidence supplied by societal comparisons and historically specific cases.

The chapter identifies the general sociological core of the Weber Thesis as a classic endeavor in economic sociology (and thus substantive sociological theory) and separates it from its particular historical dimension in the form of an empirical generalization from history. I argue that such a distinction helps to better understand the puzzling double “fate” of the Weber Thesis in social science, its status of a model in economic sociology and substantive sociological theory, on the one hand, and its frequent rejection in history and historical economics, on the other. The sociological core of the Thesis, postulating that religion, ideology, and culture generally deeply impact economy, has proved to be more valid, enduring, and even paradigmatic, as in economic sociology, than its historical component establishing a special causal linkage between Calvinism and other types of ascetic Protestantism and the “spirit” and “structure” of modern capitalism in Western society at a specific point in history.

In addition to the two cases deviating from the Weber Thesis considered here, it is necessary to investigate and identify the validity of the Thesis with regard to concrete historical and empirical instances.

The chapter provides the first effort to systematically analyze and distinguish between the sociological core and the historical components of the Weber Thesis as distinct yet intertwined components.