A Gender Perspective on Business Process Management Competences Offered on Professional Online Social Networks

While Business Process Management (BPM) originally strongly focused on Information Technology as a key factor driving the efficiency and effectiveness of organisational processes, there is a growing consensus that BPM represents a holistic management approach that also takes factors like corporate governance, human capital and organisational culture into account. Focusing on human capital, our exploratory study examines competences supplied in the BPM field and how far they represent the holistic nature of BPM. Further, our study tries to understand, whether the BPM field, which is traditionally perceived as very technical, is not immune to the challenge of female underrepresentation. Addressing underrepresentation of women in BPM would help to mitigate the existing competence shortage in the field that stems from the lack of qualified BPM professionals. Thus, we take a gender perspective in analysing 10,405 BPM-related LinkedIn profiles using a text mining technique called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). We identify 12 distinct categories of competences supplied by BPM professionals, which, in general, reflect the interdisciplinary nature of BPM, ranging from technical to managerial and domain-specific competences. Analysis of the gender distribution shows that women are underrepresented among the BPM professionals under study and, in particular, among those representing most of the identified categories of competences.