Her Opportunities
Passion Penalizes Women and Advantages (Unexceptional) Men in High-Potential Designations
Joyce He, Jon Jachimowicz & Celia Moore
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
High-potential programs offer a swift path up the corporate ladder for those who secure a place on them. However, the evaluation of “potential” occurs under considerable uncertainty, creating fertile ground for gender bias. We document that men are more likely than women to be designated as high potential, and unpack how gendered responses to employees’ expressions of passion -- one of the most commonly used criteria used in evaluating potential -- both penalize women and advantage men in high-potential selection processes. First, and based on prior research on gender display rules, we suggest that expressions of passion are viewed as a less appropriate emotional display for women than men, giving rise to a female penalty. Second, and drawing on shifting standards theorizing, we posit that expressions of passion shift evaluators’ predictions of candidates’ diligence more meaningfully for men than women, creating a male advantage -- particularly for men who are reasonably high but not exceptional performers. We provide supporting evidence across two studies examining placement into high-potential programs in a real talent review setting (N = 796) and a preregistered experiment that uses videos featuring trained actors (N = 1,366), supported by two supplementary studies (N = 1,590). Taken together, this work sheds light on the ways the increasing emphasis on passion in contemporary workplaces may exacerbate gender inequalities. Progressing our understanding of gender bias beyond gendered reactions to criteria that penalize women (i.e., backlash), our work also unveils a novel and particularly pernicious form of gender bias driven by gendered inferences about passion that advantage men.
Leaning In Softly: On Gender and Self-Promotion
Jenny Chang, Silvia Saccardo & Jana Gallus
Carnegie Mellon University Working Paper, July 2025
Abstract:
Effectively signaling one's skills and abilities can play a key role in career success. Across a series of pre-registered online experiments involving 14,054 participants, including both adults and adolescents, we investigate gender differences in both the propensity and the intensity of self-promotion. Our data show that women are less willing to opt into communicating self-promotional messages than men. When prompted to do so, women provide less favorable self-assessments. Importantly, the gender gap in the intensity of self-promotion persists even among individuals who choose to self-promote. Our findings show that the mechanisms driving gender gaps across these two margins of self-promotion are distinct, as none of the information treatments we tested consistently impacted gender gaps on both margins. These gender gaps are consequential, as self-promotion improves hiring outcomes for both men and women in our studies. The results underscore the importance of addressing both the extensive and intensive margins of self-promotion to effectively address and devise strategies to reduce gender disparities.
The Role of Reviewer Characteristics on the Diversity of Successful Applicants
Evelina Gavrilova-Zoutman & Steffen Juranek
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In their efforts to foster diversity and talent, organizations, banks, and venture capitalists utilize the expertise of reviewers to evaluate applications from a broad range of applicants. Reviewers make decisions under different types of cognitive load, such as the necessity to aggregate complex information and workload pressure. To cope with the stress, reviewers might use automatic biases to make decisions faster, which can result in lower organizational diversity. We explore the characteristics of reviewers in a particular setting -- patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We leverage quasi-exogenous variation from the random assignment of patent examiners, allowing us to find the causal impact of applicant gender and examiner characteristics on the application success rate. We find evidence that applicants with more female-sounding names have a 3.6-percentage-point lower likelihood of patent approval. We find that a high workload of the examiner leads to a decrease in the likelihood that the patent application of a female inventor would be approved, consistent with theories on coping strategies when experiencing cognitive load. Our results extend to applications filed by teams of inventors. These results suggest that it is essential to manage the stress related to reviewers’ workloads to guarantee a variety of successful candidates.
Gender and Political Expression among International Relations Scholars and the Public
Irene Entringer García Blanes et al.
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Numerous studies show that women are less likely than men to express attitudes and opinions about politics. To explore the origins of this gender gap, we use data from a series of surveys of the general public and international relations scholars in the United States between 2014 and 2023. These data show that the gender gap in political expression exists, even among knowledge elites; female IR scholars say they don’t know the answer to survey questions at higher rates than their male colleagues. We also find that differences in political knowledge explain a significant part of the gap in political expression; the highly educated female scholars we surveyed were less likely than women in the general public to say they didn’t know the answer to survey questions. At the same time, factors other than knowledge, including confidence, also matter. Our public opinion survey shows that women select extreme answers, such as “strongly agree/disagree” rather than simply “agree/disagree,” at lower rates than men. Despite high levels of education among the female scholars we surveyed, they too are more hesitant than their male counterparts to select extreme answers. These findings have important implications for civic participation as well as for the recognition of women’s expertise within the academy and society more broadly.
Reject or Protect? Corrective Action in Response to Women’s vs. Men’s Reports of Workplace Abuse
Timothy Kundro et al.
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Organizations encourage employees to report abusive behavior as such reports are believed to facilitate corrective action against transgressors. However, there are competing perspectives on whether reports made by women (versus men) will facilitate corrective action. On the one hand, a dominant stream of research suggests that reports made by women are often ignored and disregarded because women are not seen as credible. On the other hand, an emerging stream of research suggests that third parties will see reports made by women as serious and important. To reconcile these perspectives, we draw on aversive discrimination theory, which hints that the degree of corroboration about abuse plays a key role. That is, under situations of low corroboration, third parties are unlikely to take corrective action when women (versus men) make reports, but under situations of high corroboration, third parties are equally or even more likely to take corrective action when women (versus men) make reports. We additionally theorize and find that corroboration is particularly influential when the reporter’s general credibility is not established. Our empirical package includes six complementary studies: an archival data set of U.S. Government employees and five preregistered experiments.
Gender, Network Recall, and Structural Holes
Eric Quintane et al.
Personnel Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Accurate recall of social networks is critical to individuals' success in organizations, as it enables them to leverage networks more effectively. Understanding whether men or women exhibit greater recall accuracy is particularly important given persistent gender inequalities in workplaces and the role of networks in shaping access to social resources and opportunities. We propose that women and men exhibit different levels of recall accuracy, which depend on the structural characteristics of the network. Specifically, women's greater reliance on the triadic closure mental schema -- assuming a relationship between two individuals who are both connected to the same third party -- enhances their recall accuracy in more cohesive networks with many closed triads but diminishes it in networks with more structural holes. Across three studies, including a demographically diverse sample representative of the US population, we confirm that women exhibit superior network recall accuracy on average and show that this advantage is contingent on network structure. This research advances our understanding of gender differences in network cognition and offers a potential cognitive explanation for women's underrepresentation in brokerage positions, which require recognizing open triads.
Reactions, Revisions, and Rehiring: Changes in Employers’ Gendered Preferences in Online Labor Markets
Claire Daviss & Ming Leung
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Employers in online labor marketplaces prefer women over men because of stereotypes that women are more trustworthy. These stereotypes are especially salient in this context because of the uncertainty in online transactions. Yet, employers’ interactions with women and men workers might moderate the influence of trustworthiness stereotypes and, by extension, employers’ hiring preferences for individual women and men as well as gender categories in general. By exploiting rare access to large-scale, longitudinal hiring data from an online labor marketplace, we examine how employers’ interactions with workers shape their subsequent hiring preferences. Using linear probability models with job fixed effects, we find that employers prefer rehiring workers with whom they previously had positive interactions over unknown workers. Men workers benefit more than women workers from positive interactions, suggesting that these interactions decrease the influence of negative stereotypes about men’s trustworthiness. We additionally find that employers prefer hiring workers of the same gender as workers with whom they previously had positive interactions, suggesting that employers’ interactions with individual women and men shape their preferences for hiring women and men in general. These findings point to a nuanced theoretical relationship between employers’ interactions with workers and their social category preferences in hiring under conditions of immense uncertainty.
Offering safe passage: Grading systems and gendered enrollment patterns in undergraduate mathematics
Monique Harrison
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
While copious research documents that early grades in college are fateful for persistence in STEM fields, social scientists have seldom considered how grading systems themselves might influence STEM progress. Drawing on university-wide transcript data and longitudinal interview data from a cohort of undergraduates moving through an elite university, I show that a university-wide transition from A–F to pass/fail grades during the COVID-19 pandemic substantially influenced student decisions to enroll in mathematics courses. Female-identified students from minoritized ethno-racial groups were substantially more likely to enroll in their first math courses than demographically similar students in prior years. Interviews reveal that pass/fail grades gave these students a sense of safety with a subject they perceived as difficult. Integrating these findings with insights from the sociology of quantification, I theorize that grading systems -- the specific scales used to assign final course grades (e.g., A–F grading or pass/fail) -- may have independent effects on demographic segmentation and stratification in undergraduate education.
Setting Up the Gap? Gender Differences in Initial Salary Offers in Hiring
Shiya Wang & Adina Sterling
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
One common explanation for the gender wage gap is that women have less favorable negotiation outcomes than men in labor markets. Yet, women might also start out with lower offers upon which negotiations occur. A challenge in examining the latter explanation has been that salaries, not salary offers, have been previously available to researchers. In this study, we overcome this empirical challenge by obtaining data on more than 700,000 initial salary offers provided to job candidates in the United States from 2017 to 2020. This allows us to conduct the first wide-scale investigation of initial salary offers in the literature. We hypothesize that a gender offer gap exists and that it is larger in masculine-typed occupations than in feminine-typed occupations. Consistent with our arguments, we find a gender offer gap of 5.5%, net of detailed controls for job, employer, occupation, industry, location, and human capital characteristics. Additionally, we find suggestive evidence that the gender offer gap is larger in occupations with more masculine-typed tasks compared with occupations with more feminine-typed tasks. We close with a discussion of how an understanding of the gender offer gap contributes to research on gender inequality, labor markets, and organizations.