Author(s): A. Lakshmana Rao, Nikhil Kulshrestha, P.C Bahuguna, G. Rama Krishnan
The term “Gender” is quite often used to refer about a person being male or female. Whereas, the term gender-gap is majorly denoted to express the ratio of male to female. Both the terms gender and gender gap are widely used in various environments such as organizational, political, sociological, cultural, economic, legal and educational context. The term is very crucial in understanding certain challenges these environments facing and posing at an organizational level. However, the present research paper focused on Gender gap from the angle of Human Resource Environment. HR environment consisting of workforce or human capital is backbone for running any organization successfully. However, HR environment is clothed with certain external environmental barriers like legal, societal, economic, political, technological and cultural environments. Gender being comes under both internal and external environments. Organizations have to deal with this subject very carefully. At this juncture, from the context of organization, the subject of gender gap is to be verified from many folds. The current research paper is intended to address this phenomenon. Another observation from the literature is that organizations are focusing towards their major objective of wealth maximization. In fact, the major objective of Organizational Development (OD) is wealth maximization itself. In order to achieve this objective, organizations usually resorts to various techniques or interventions of Organizational Development in the form of strategies. The term gender generally is crucial, while assessing an organization’s internal environment, especially human resource environment. The current research paper signifies the impact of Gender on Organizational Development. Though gender is a significant factor in deciding various facets of organizational development, organizations have to come up with strategies, especially on one of the important area like “workforce composition”. Organizations are adopting different practices and policies to deal with the situation and the current research paper focusses on the dimension of workforce composition in different contexts. Much of progressive researches focused on “Gender” under the umbrella of “Gender Equality” but not focused on the impact of “Gender gap” on organizational growth and development. The present research paper caters to this need by raising certain fundamental questions with respect to “Gender gap”.