Perceived cultural challenges faced by women employees in it sector to progress in their career

Malaysian women workforce has been undergoing crisis where the number of female employees become thinner as they climb up the corporate ladder especially in IT sector (TalentCorp-PwC, 2013). In conjunction with this, the objective of this research was set to identify the perceived cultural challenges faced by women employees to progress in their career in IT sector in Malaysia. Five highly mentioned challenges were selected from literature review and cultural models to be investigated. Cultural stereotype (Hofstede, 2010), Gender inequality (Hofstede, 2010), low selfesteem (Instone, Major, & Bunker, 1983), gender gap in mentoring (Universal Integrated Framework, 2007) and family-work life conflict (Voydanoff, P, 2005) are the challenges investigated in this study which are also defined as the independent variables of this research. Whereas, career progress plays a role as the dependent variable. Wide range of literature review, theory and cultural models were analyzed in this research. A new conceptual framework has been derived for this study, to best fit the objective of the research and based on the input from the analysis done on Hofstede Cultural Model (2010) and other cross cultural models. Quantitative research method along with the positivist research paradigm was adopted in this research. Questionnaire was used as an instrument to collect data among 140 female employees from a leading private IT MNC organization located in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. The research was conducted in line with agreed ethics and compliance. Data analysis were conducted using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 21. The key result of this paper has meet the objective of this study where all the independent variables seems to have a significant relationship with the career progress of women employees. Perceived cultural challenges from most impacting to least impacting is as followed: Gender gap in mentoring, Low self-esteem, Gender inequality, Family work life conflict and followed by cultural stereotype. More detail analysis were done using correlation and regression analysis and the results are explained well in chapter 4 of this dissertation. Although this dissertation covers the objective of the research precisely, there are some minor limitations such as the sample size of 140 employees may not be very effective because larger samples give a broader picture of the research. As a future recommendation, it is suggested that this research should be conducted among female IT employees from various state in Malaysia so that it covers the culture differences among different geographical area