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Professor wins best paper award for women’s leadership studyProfessor wins best paper award for women's leadership study

A Thunderbird professor who directs a women’s entrepreneurship program in Afghanistan won an international award June 30 in San Diego for her study of women’s participation in business leadership in 115 countries.

Amanda M. Bullough, Ph.D., accepted the best paper award for increased gender awareness in international business research at the 2009 Academy of International Business conference. The award, presented by the Women in the Academy of International Business, is sponsored by the Institute of International Business at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden.

The paper also finished as a top-three finalist for the Emerging Scholar Award in Women’s Entrepreneurship. Bullough wrote the study with a team of six researchers as part of her dissertation at Florida International University.

“Each society, government or policymaker would need to take this and look at their individual country and determine where they are in relation to the others,” said Bullough, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Thunderbird’s Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship. “They need to talk to the women in their countries and find out what the obstacles are.”

Data from 11 secondary sources – such as the World Bank and the GLOBE project led by Thunderbird Dean of Research Mansour Javidan, Ph.D. – showed that many factors can influence women’s participation in business leadership. These factors vary around the world and affect countries with a lower prevalence of women in leadership differently than countries with high levels of women’s participation.

“Women face new and different challenges and opportunities that vary depending on the environment in which they operate,” Bullough said.

Her results challenge the notion that developing countries can be clumped together as less progressive in terms of their gender beliefs. The paper identifies several developing nations with high rates of women in business leadership positions. Ghana, Rwanda and Botswana, for example, fall into the same cluster as Switzerland, Canada and the United States.

“It’s not just a matter of modernity and economic development,” Bullough said. “It’s a whole bunch of other things.”

She said globalization, international trade and technological advances such as the Internet have helped spread a supportive environment for women in many countries. “It helps women see what’s going on in other places,” she said. “It helps open up people’s minds.”

Of course, none of this matters much in places where people must worry about basic survival.

“Until you can establish security and health care and basic nourishment, you’re going to have a tough time getting anybody – women or men – involved in entrepreneurship or business leadership,” Bullough said.

This is a particular challenge in Afghanistan, where Bullough serves as Thunderbird’s academic director for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurship Program.

Thunderbird and the American University of Afghanistan work together in the program to provide business education for women entrepreneurs in the war-torn country. Other Goldman Sachs partners run similar programs elsewhere, with a goal of educating 10,000 underserved women around the world by 2013.

Despite the obstacles in Afghanistan, Bullough said many women are emerging as business leaders.

“The security is terrible, and the women are facing long-term cultural and religious traditions that might impede their involvement in business leadership,” she said. “But women are doing it anyway. They’re forging ahead and starting businesses, growing businesses and hiring people.”

Bullough’s paper, “Institutional Factors Affecting Women’s Participation in Business Leadership Around the Globe,” is part of a two-part series. In a separate paper, she examines factors affecting women’s participation in political leadership in 181 countries.

“Countries with high proportions of women in political leadership do not necessarily have high proportions of women in business leadership,” Bullough said.

For more on Amanda Bullough's story, visit the Thunderbird Knowledge Network.