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Women’s work experience and education have increased dramatically. Yet, genders are generally different in professional behaviors and skills and still unequally represented in workplace around the world. For example, in the USA, 57 percent of women are in the labor force, and 70 percent of them are working moms with children under age of 18 (United States Department of Labor, 2017). After decades of efforts for promoting gender equality in the workplace, there is still a persistent wage gap between genders (Upright, 2017). More than 40 percent of female employees had higher education degrees in 2016; yet, they are still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) occupations (DeWolf, 2017), which tend to have higher pay than other occupations. Specifically, women (about 66 percent) are overrepresented in the low-wage jobs (defined as occupations with median wages of $10.10 or less per hour) such as childcare workers, cashiers, restaurant servers, maids, home health aides and fast-food workers (National Women’s Law Center, 2014). In Europe, there are still barriers preventing women from representing top leading positions in healthcare, academia and business (Kalaitzi et al., 2017). In Brazil, Araújo et al. (2017) analyzed more than 270,000 scientists and discovered gender differences in scientific collaborations over all fields, except in engineering. Specifically, their study indicated that men tend to collaborate more with other men while women are more egalitarian. In Germany, female medical students seemed to perform better in the dimensions of empathy, structure, verbal expression and non-verbal expression (Graf et al., 2017). Similar to many western countries that female leaders in South Korea often lack of developmental opportunities and are more likely to experience work-life imbalance because of socially defined gender roles and gendered workplace, which tend to exclude women from informal networking such as after-work drinks (Cho et al., 2016). In Pakistan, women are more likely to use intuitive problem-solving style than men (Khan et al., 2016). In other words, gender tends to be different in intuition decision making in the workplace. Overall, these research and statistical evidences suggested that genders are different in many ways regardless which country or culture they are in.
To address gender differences and ensure effective training outcomes, training professionals or adult educators need to have a...