Differences Among Korean Women Attending Women’s Schools and Coed Schools: Gender Identity and Perception of Workplace Culture for Women

Abstract

By looking at the relationship between workplace culture and gender identity, this research examines ways to potentially improve women’s satisfaction and perceptions of female workers in this presently disadvantageous work environment in Korea. Drawing from previous criticism for having prioritized inter-group processes over particular social identities, this research uses Social Identity Theory as the main theoretical framework in two studies to structure the factors affecting workplace environment, specifically workplace culture for women and working women’s satisfaction with communication. The first study applies intra-group analysis to examine the impact that the gender composition of a school has on gender identity, and it examines the relationship between organizational gender composition and women’s perceptions of workplace culture by employing an experiment within a survey, which contains scenarios of an imaginary workplace, to Korean female college students ( n = 439). The results demonstrate women attending women’s colleges displayed stronger gender identity than those attending co-ed colleges on two dimensions of gender identity: in-group ties and centrality. The second study surveys Korean female workers ( n = 171) to examine the same relationships while more deeply looking into the effects of gender composition of the workplace on women’s satisfaction with communication. The main finding shows that for a sex-integrated organization, women who attended women’s colleges denoted higher communication satisfaction with supervisors and same-sex coworkers than women who attended coed colleges. Implications of these findings and future research directions are discussed.