Managing diversity
Are Good-Looking People More Employable?
Bradley Ruffle & Ze'ev Shtudiner
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the role of physical attractiveness in the hiring process. We sent 5,312 curricula vitae (CVs) in pairs to 2,656 advertised job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture, whereas the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male or female or a plain-looking male or female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callback than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations for this discrimination against attractive women and provide evidence that female jealousy and envy are likely reasons.
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Gender and Business Outcomes of Black and Hispanic New Entrepreneurs in the United States
Marie Mora & Alberto Dávila
American Economic Review, May 2014, Pages 245-249
Abstract:
In light of the growing numbers of women of color in the entrepreneurial sector in the United States, employing public-use microdata from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners, this study finds that new firms owned by black and Hispanic women were more likely to cease operations than those owned by their male counterparts or by non-Hispanic whites, even when controlling for other owner- and firm-level characteristics and labor market conditions. These differences occurred despite the existence of public programs designed to help female and minority entrepreneurs, raising the question of efficiency of the current policy infrastructure in the United States.
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Melissa Williams & Serena Chen
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, July 2014, Pages 436-452
Abstract:
Although men are typically considered to have more power than women, women are more likely than men to be primary decision makers in the household domain. We argue that the portrayal of women’s traditional role as representing a form of power, albeit limited in scope, is widespread in popular culture, and that this power is perceived as desirable and providing a subjective sense of control (Study 1). Yet power over household decision making may also function to reduce women’s objections to a status quo in which they have less power overall, outside their traditional role. Two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) showed that power over household decisions (but not mere domestic tasks) reduced women’s interest in achieving power in the workplace. Men’s interest in workplace power, on the other hand, was unaffected by the degree to which they wielded power at home.
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Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola & Dolly Chugh
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
Little is known about how discrimination against women and minorities manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations or how it varies within and between organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. We hypothesized that discrimination would appear at the informal “pathway” preceding entry to academia and would vary by discipline and university as a function of faculty representation and pay. In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities prior to applying to a doctoral program. Names of students were randomly assigned to signal gender and race (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese), but messages were otherwise identical. We found that faculty ignored requests from women and minorities at a higher rate than requests from Caucasian males, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions. Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and discrimination were uncorrelated, suggesting that greater representation cannot be assumed to reduce discrimination. This research highlights the importance of studying what happens before formal entry points into organizations and reveals that discrimination is not evenly distributed within and between organizations.
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Deepak Hegde & Justin Tumlinson
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop a formal model to understand the selection and influence effects of social proximity (homophily) between business partners. Consistent with the model's predictions, we find that U.S. venture capitalists (VCs) are more likely to select start-ups with coethnic executives for investment, particularly when the probability of the start-up's success appears low. Ethnic proximity between VCs and the start-ups they invest in is positively related to performance, measured by the probability of the companies' successful exit through acquisitions and initial public offerings (IPOs) and net income after IPO. Two-stage regression estimates suggest that these positive performance outcomes are largely due to influence, that is, superior communication and coordination between coethnic VCs and start-up executives after the investment. To the extent that VCs expect to work better with coethnic start-ups, they invest in coethnic ventures that are of lower observable quality than noncoethnic ventures.
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Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices
Thomas Buser, Muriel Niederle & Hessel Oosterbeek
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the Netherlands. Although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability, boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks, where more prestigious tracks are more math and science intensive. Our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls. We find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability. Most importantly, we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion (about 20 percent) of the gender difference in track choice.
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Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites
Amy Hsin & Yu Xie
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.
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Culture Shock Revisited: The Social and Cultural Contingencies to Class Marginality
Anthony Abraham Jack
Sociological Forum, June 2014, Pages 453–475
Abstract:
Existing explanations of class marginality predict similar social experiences for all lower-income undergraduates. This article extends this literature by presenting data highlighting the cultural and social contingencies that account for differences in experiences of class marginality. The degree of cultural and social dissimilarity between one's life before and during college helps explain variation in experiences. I contrast the experiences of two groups of lower-income, black undergraduates — the Doubly Disadvantaged and Privileged Poor. Although from comparable disadvantaged households and neighborhoods, they travel along divergent paths to college. Unlike the Doubly Disadvantaged, whose precollege experiences are localized, the Privileged Poor cross social boundaries for school. In college, the Doubly Disadvantaged report negative interactions with peers and professors and adopt isolationist strategies, while the Privileged Poor generally report positive interactions and adopt integrationist strategies. In addition to extending present conceptualizations of class marginality, this study advances our understanding of how and when class and culture matter in stratification processes in college.
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Sara McClelland & Kathryn Holland
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined how university leaders described what and who needed to change in order to increase the representation of female faculty in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) departments. Thirty-one (28 men and 3 women) STEM departmental chairs and deans at a large, public university participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were examined using both qualitative and quantitative procedures. Analysis focused on participants’ descriptions of responsibility for changes related to gender equity. Using the distinction of high versus low responsibility, themes were examined for their qualitative characteristics as well as their frequency. Leaders who exhibited high personal responsibility most frequently saw themselves as needing to change and also named their male colleagues as concurrently responsible for diversity. Conversely, leaders who exhibited low personal responsibility most frequently described female faculty as responsible and described women’s attitudes and their “choice” to have a family as obstacles to gender diversity in STEM. We argue that the dimensions of high and low responsibility are useful additions to discussions of leadership, workplace diversity initiatives, and gender equity more broadly. To this end, we provide several methodological tools to examine these subtle, yet essential, aspects of how diversity and change efforts are imagined and discussed.
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Do Black Mayors Improve Black Relative to White Employment Outcomes? Evidence from Large US Cities
John Nye, Ilia Rainer & Thomas Stratmann
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities’ mayors between 1973 and 2004. We find that relative to whites, black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture causal effects of black mayors. Black mayors also lead to higher black incomes relative to white incomes. We show that our results continue to hold when we compare the treated cities to alternative control groups of cities, explicitly control for changing attitudes towards blacks or use regression discontinuity analysis to compare cities that elected black and white mayors in close elections.
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Margarita Torre
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women's entry into formerly male-dominated occupations has increased in recent decades, yet a significant outflow remains. This study examines the determinants of women's exits from male-dominated occupations, focusing on the effect of previous occupational trajectories. In particular, it hypothesizes that occupational trajectories in female-dominated occupations are often imbued with meanings and beliefs about the (in)appropriateness of the worker, which adversely affect women's integration and chances when they enter the male sector. Using the NLSY79 data set, the study analyzes the job histories of women employed in the United States between 1979 and 2006. The results reveal a disproportionate risk of exit among newcomers from female-dominated occupations. Also, women who reenter the male field are more likely to leave it again. Altogether, the findings challenge explanations based on deficiencies in the information available to women at the moment of hiring. The evidence points to the existence of a “scar effect” of previous work in the female field, which hinders women's opportunities in the male sector and ends up increasing the likelihood of exit.
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Ena Inesi & Daniel Cable
Personnel Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research explores the possibility that the very accomplishments that are critical to success during the hiring process (e.g., educational attainment, promotion history) can lead to a drop in future performance evaluations for women. We theorized that evaluators may see such competence signals as a threat to the traditional gender hierarchy, which leads to a negative bias when evaluating women's on-the-job performance. In Study 1, we examined this hypothesis among commanding officers in the United States military, who gave lower performance ratings to female subordinates whose pay-grade approached their own. The same was not true for male subordinates. Studies 2, 3a and 3b experimentally tested the boundary conditions of this effect using two additional competence signals (educational attainment and past career successes) and two different populations. Across these studies, we replicated the negative relationship between competence signal strength and performance evaluations for female subordinates, but only under conditions in which the evaluator would be particularly likely to experience gender hierarchy threat. Specifically, it emerged when the evaluator was male and high social-dominance-oriented, and when the female subordinate's objective on-the-job performance was high. Finally, Study 3a demonstrated how organizations can mitigate this negative bias by using objective (rather than subjective) performance evaluations.
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Are Female Supervisors More Female-Friendly?
Steven Bednar & Dora Gicheva
American Economic Review, May 2014, Pages 370-375
Abstract:
We introduce the idea that easily inferable demographic characteristics such as gender may not be sufficient to define type in the supervisor-employee mentoring relationship. We use longitudinal data on athletic directors at NCAA Division I programs to identify through observed mobility the propensity of top-level administrators to hire and retain female head coaches, above and beyond an organization's culture. We show that supervisor gender appears to be unrelated to female friendliness in this setting. Overall, our findings indicate that more focus should be placed on the more complex manager type defined by attitudes in addition to attributes.
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Lynn Prince Cooke
European Sociological Review, June 2014, Pages 360-372
Abstract:
Parenthood explains some of the gender earnings gap, but its effects differ among women and men and across countries. Wave 6 LIS data and regressions of the recentered influence function are used to compare effects of parenthood across the unconditional earnings distribution in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The three countries are considered more liberal welfare regimes, but still differ in within- and between-gender economic inequality. Australia has slightly greater income equality than the other two countries. Results reveal that fatherhood premiums and motherhood penalties are smaller in Australia, as are differences between the highest- and lowest-earning parents. Australian and British mothers are more likely to work part-time, but controlling for work hours, motherhood penalties in those countries are smaller across the bottom half of the distribution than in the United States. Motherhood penalties across the upper half of the earnings distribution are more similar in the three countries and decrease as earnings increase. The lowest-earning men in all three countries face small but significant fatherhood penalties, whereas high-earning British and US fathers garner significant premiums as compared with childless men. Parenthood penalties and premiums therefore reflect relative socio-economic (dis)advantage among both women and men, as well as between them.
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Gender Gap in School Science: Are Single-Sex Schools Important?
Joanna Sikora
Sex Roles, May 2014, Pages 400-415
Abstract:
This paper compares science subject choices and science-related career plans of Australian adolescents in single-sex and coeducational schools. Data from the nationally representative Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth collected from students who were 15 years of age in 2009 show that, in all schools, boys are overrepresented in physical science courses and careers, while girls are overrepresented in life science. It appears that students in all-girls schools are more likely to take physical science subjects and are keener on careers in physics, computing or engineering than their counterparts in coeducational schools. However, multi-level logit regressions reveal that most apparent differences between students in single-sex and coeducational schools are brought about by differentials in academic achievement, parental characteristics, student’s science self-concept, study time and availability of qualified teachers. The only differences remaining after introducing control variables are the higher propensity of boys in single-sex schools to plan a life science career and the marginally lower propensity of girls in girls-only schools to study life science subjects. Thus, single-sex schooling fosters few non-traditional choices of science specialization. The paper discusses the likely consequences of gender segregation in science and a limited potential of single-sex schools to reduce them. The results of the current analysis are contrasted with a comparable study conducted in Australia a decade ago to illustrate the persistence of the gender gap in science field choices.
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The Impact of Advice on Women's and Men's Selection into Competition
Jordi Brandts, Valeska Groenert & Christina Rott
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how advice by a more experienced and better-informed person affects an individual's entry into a real-effort tournament and the gender gap. Our experiment is motivated by the concerns raised by approaching the gender gap through affirmative action policies. Overall, advice improves the entry decision of subjects, in that forgone earnings due to wrong entry decisions go significantly down. The improvements are mainly driven by increased entry of strong-performing women, who also become more confident, and reduced entry of weak-performing men. We find that the overall gender gap persists even though it disappears among low and strong performers. The persistence is due to an emerging gender gap among intermediate performers driven by women (men) following more the advice to stay out of (enter) the tournament in this performance group.
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Affirmative Action and Other Group Tradeoff Policies: Identifiability of Those Adversely Affected
Ilana Ritov & Eyal Zamir
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
When social resources are limited, improving the lot of the underprivileged comes at the expense of others. Thus, policies such as Affirmative Action (AA) — designed to increase the representation of minority people in higher education or employment — implicitly entail tradeoffs between groups. We propose that, while aversion to person- or group-tradeoffs of this sort is widespread, the identifiability of those who stand to lose is a moderating factor. In five experiments, we compared support for several hypothetical AA procedures that are equivalent in terms of the overall harm and benefit, but differ with respect to the identifiability of those who stand to lose from its implementation. Results support the claim that the identifiability of those adversely affected reduces support for AA policies and for similar procedures that are unrelated to civil rights issues. Possible determinants and legal implications of this effect are discussed.
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Katheryn Christy & Jesse Fox
Computers & Education, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gamification includes the use of gaming features, such as points or leaderboards, in non-gaming contexts, and is a frequently-discussed trend in education. One way of gamifying the classroom is to introduce leaderboards. Leaderboards allow students to see how they are performing relative to others in the same class. Little empirical research has investigated the impact of leaderboards on academic performance. In this study, 80 female undergraduates took a math test in a virtual representation of a classroom after being exposed to one of three leaderboard conditions: a leaderboard where men held the majority of the top positions, a leaderboard where women held the majority of top positions, and a no leaderboard condition. Participants in the female majority leaderboard condition performed more poorly on the math test than those in the male leaderboard condition, yet demonstrated a higher level of academic identification than those in the male and control conditions. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications that this study’s findings may have for the use of leaderboards within educational environments.
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Adèle Cassola et al.
Politics & Gender, June 2014, Pages 200-235
Abstract:
In countries around the world, constitutional protections of women's rights have provided a legal foundation to combat discriminatory laws, customs, and actions and a catalyst for advances in gender equality. This article draws on newly available data from 191 countries to analyze women's constitutional rights across the spheres of general equality and nondiscrimination, political participation, social and economic rights, family life, and customary and religious law. We examined how gender-specific and universal protections differed according to a constitution's year of adoption and last amendment, and identified regional patterns that persisted across all decades. Women were explicitly guaranteed general equality or nondiscrimination in 81% of constitutions, some aspect of political equality in 32%, marital equality in 27%, some aspect of work equality in 26%, and equal educational rights in 9% of constitutions. Protection of women's rights increased substantially between 1980 and 2011. As of June 2011, however, no constitution in the Middle East and North Africa guaranteed gender-specific protection in education, work, or marriage, and there were no guarantees of marital equality in South Asian constitutions. Of the constitutions that protected some aspect of gender equality, 5% stated that customary or religious laws could prevail over constitutional provisions.
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Hannah Valantine et al.
Academic Medicine, June 2014, Pages 904–911
Purpose: To assess whether the proportion of women faculty, especially at the full professor rank, increased from 2004 to 2010 at Stanford University School of Medicine after a multifaceted intervention.
Method: The authors surveyed gender composition and faculty satisfaction five to seven years after initiating a multifaceted intervention to expand recruitment and development of women faculty. The authors assessed pre/post relative change and rates of increase in women faculty at each rank, and faculty satisfaction; and differences in pre/post change and estimated rate of increase between Stanford and comparator cohorts (nationally and at peer institutions).
Results: Post intervention, women faculty increased by 74% (234 to 408), with assistant, associate, and full professors increasing by 66% (108 to 179), 87% (74 to 138), and 75% (52 to 91), respectively. Nationally and at peer institutions, women faculty increased by about 30% (from 30,230 to 39,200 and 4,370 to 5,754 respectively), respectively, with lower percentages at each rank compared with Stanford. Estimated difference (95% CI) in annual rate of increase was larger for Stanford versus the national cohort: combined ranks 0.36 (0.17 to 0.56), P = .001; full professor 0.40 (0.18 to 0.62), P = .001; and versus the peer cohort: combined ranks 0.29 (0.07 to 0.51), P = .02; full professor 0.37 (0.14 to 0.60), P = .003. Stanford women faculty satisfaction increased from 48% (2003) to 71% (2008).
Conclusions: Increased satisfaction and proportion of women faculty, especially full professors, suggest that the intervention may ameliorate the gender gap in academic medicine.
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Javier Polavieja & Lucinda Platt
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Boys and girls with sex-typical aspirations are significantly more likely to end up in sex-typical jobs as adults. Preference formation among children is therefore relevant for subsequent occupational outcomes. This study investigates the role of parental socialization and children's agency in the formation of sex-typed occupational preferences using data for British children aged 11 to 15. We anchor agency in observable psychological attributes associated with children's capacity to act in the face of constraints. We focus on two such attributes, motivation and self-esteem. Our findings identify two main sources of parental influence: (1) parental sex-typical behaviors, from which children learn which occupations are appropriate for each sex; and (2) parental socio-economic resources, which affect children's occupational ambition. We find, additionally, that girls with high motivation and both girls and boys with high self-esteem are less likely to aspire to sex-typical occupations, net of parental characteristics. Motivation and self-esteem help girls aim higher in the occupational ladder, which automatically reduces their levels of sex-typicality. For boys, however, self-esteem reduces sex-typicality at all levels of the aspired occupational distribution. This suggests that boys with high self-esteem are better equipped to contradict the existing social norms regarding sex-typical behavior. Implications are discussed.
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Influence of Communication Partner’s Gender on Language
Adrienne Hancock & Benjamin Rubin
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Forty participants (20 male) had 3-minute conversations with trained male and female communication partners in a repeated-measures, within-subject design. Eighty 3-minute conversations were transcribed and coded for dependent clauses, fillers, tag questions, intensive adverbs, negations, hedges, personal pronouns, self-references, justifiers, and interruptions. Results suggest no significant changes in language based on speaker gender. However, when speaking with a female, participants interrupted more and used more dependent clauses than when speaking with a male. There was no significant interaction to suggest that the language differences based on communication partner was specific to one gender group. These results are discussed in context of previous research, communication accommodation theory, and general process model for gendered language.
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Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market
Rindy Anderson et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2014
Abstract:
Vocal fry is speech that is low pitched and creaky sounding, and is increasingly common among young American females. Some argue that vocal fry enhances speaker labor market perceptions while others argue that vocal fry is perceived negatively and can damage job prospects. In a large national sample of American adults we find that vocal fry is interpreted negatively. Relative to a normal speaking voice, young adult female voices exhibiting vocal fry are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable. The negative perceptions of vocal fry are stronger for female voices relative to male voices. These results suggest that young American females should avoid using vocal fry speech in order to maximize labor market opportunities.
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Performance pay and ethnic earnings differences in Britain
Colin Green, John Heywood & Nikolaos Theodoropoulos
Oxford Economic Papers, July 2014, Pages 798-823
Abstract:
In the first British study, we show that the ethnic earnings gap amongst performance pay jobs is smaller than that amongst time rate jobs. This partially reflects sorting but persists with diminished magnitude in fixed effect estimates. Although varying somewhat with specification, quantile decompositions show that the smaller ethnic earnings gap is driven by bonus payments in the upper middle portion of the earnings distribution. These findings differ dramatically from those for the USA in which performance pay has been associated with larger negative racial differentials especially at the top of the earnings distribution.
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Moa Bursell
European Sociological Review, June 2014, Pages 399-409
Abstract:
Scholars have documented ethnic and gender discrimination across labour markets since the 1970s by using field experiments (correspondence tests) in which pairs of equally qualified applications are sent to employers with job openings. In these experiments, discrimination is measured by documenting group differences in callbacks. However, the gendered nature of ethnic discrimination has been neglected thus far in this literature. Drawing on the results of a correspondence test, this study presents evidence of extensive ethnic discrimination in the Swedish labour market against applicants with Arabic and North African names but no evidence of discrimination against women. However, the findings also reveal gendered ethnic employer preferences: employers in male-dominated occupations practice gender overcompensation favouring female-named applicants, whereas employers in female-dominated occupations practice both ethnic and gender overcompensation, favouring foreign-named men in particular.