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Pushing the limits: The need for a behavioural approach to equality in Civil Engineering

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-05-09, 10:45 authored by Chrissi McCarthy, Derek ThomsonDerek Thomson, Sarah Barnard, Andrew Dainty
Diversity within civil engineering has been limited by the sector’s failure to recruit and retain minorities. A contributing factor to this disproportionate turnover of out-group members is hostile and discriminatory treatment from peers and managers. When evaluated critically, equality approaches intended to reduce discrimination have been found to have no impact, or a negative impact in many organisations. It is posited that employee perceptions of organisational fairness influence employee attitudes towards equality approaches and must be considered before undertaking further work in this area. Regression analysis is used to evaluate survey data from 700 employees of large Civil Engineering, Main Contractor Organisations (MCO) to determine if a relationship between employee perceptions of organisational fairness and attitudes towards equality approaches exists. The analysis found a significant correlation between the two variables, although causality cannot be established from this research alone, the findings suggest that perceptions of fairness may shape employee responses to equality approaches, which in turn may impact on their behaviour towards minority group members. These findings imply that failure to implement a behavioural approach to equality approaches that considers the organisational perceptions of employees, may limit diversity within organisations.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology

Volume

11

Issue

1

Pages

146-174

Citation

MCCARTHY, C. ... et al, 2019. Pushing the limits: The need for a behavioural approach to equality in Civil Engineering. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 11 (1), pp.146-174.

Publisher

The Open University © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2019-05-01

Publication date

2019-06-14

Notes

This is an Open Access article. It is published by The Open University under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

ISSN

2040-0748

Language

  • en