Administrative Science Quarterly Online Table of Contents Alert
Virtual Special Issue on Gender Inequality is available online
Documenting Novel Mechanisms of Gender Inequality:
A Decade of Exemplary Research on Gender
In honor of Women's History Month, we have selected six excellent articles published at ASQ in the last ten years that examine women at work. ASQ has a long tradition of publishing insightful research on gender. In 1992, Herminia Ibarra wrote a paper that found women received fewer returns from their networks-and had networks that were less homophilous-than men (women created friendship ties with women and turned to men for instrumental information). This became ASQ's most highly cited gender paper and provided a foundation for many of the papers featured here. The six papers we feature answer important questions about how women navigate the workplace. We hope they inspire more work in this important area.
These papers examine novel mechanisms that can create, maintain, and reduce inequities for women: task segregation (Chan and Anteby, 2016), differential responses to rejection (Brands and Fernandez-Mateo, 2017), failure to recognize women's expertise (Joshi, 2014), assumptions about audience beliefs and attitudes toward women (Abraham, 2020), creation of new jobs (Cohen and Broschak, 2013), and framing family distinctly as a women's issue (Padavic, Ely, and Reid, 2020). These mechanisms operate both on the supply and demand sides and at their intersection. They show subtle processes that operate, for the most part, on an unconscious level. These are not the usual suspects. ASQ has published several other recent papers that importantly demonstrate how men's family structure and ideology influence women's success at work (Desai, Chugh, and Brief, 2014; Carnahan and Greenwood, 2018), and we encourage a close look at these papers (as well as many other papers we did not have room to highlight here). But in this special issue we focus on the mechanisms hidden below the surface that point us in some new directions.
Several of these papers show ways that women reap lesser benefits than similarly situated men: women in the same job as men are segregated to perform more of the less-valued tasks (Chan and Anteby, 2016); network contacts infer preferences for men in male-typed roles and so are less likely to refer women to third parties in these instances (Abraham, 2020); and the expertise of highly educated women is less likely to be recognized than that of similar men (Joshi, 2014). Several of these papers consider gender as an important aspect of structure that produces or reduces inequality: when there are more women in management, women are more likely to fill newly created jobs (Cohen and Broschak, 2013); when there are more women on a team, the expertise of highly educated women is more likely to be recognized (Joshi, 2014). There is a paradox here: The presence of more women may lead to more opportunities for women. But there are many reasons why women may or may not gain and retain entrée to positions, teams, and organizations. These papers show that individuals, peers, and organizations all play a role. Brands and Fernandez (2017) find that because of their outsider status and structural position, women seeking management jobs tend to perceive rejection as more serious; when rejected, they opt out of the process altogether. Abraham (2020) highlights how peers limit the information women are able to access in their network more than they do for men in the very same network. Padavic, Ely, and Reid (2020) find that organizations continue to promulgate the work–family narrative as a woman's problem even though their evidence suggests that workplace struggles are not gender-specific.
Across these papers, the scholars use a range of rigorous methodological approaches: detailed analyses of archival records to see the broad patterns; creative experiments in the laboratory and field that isolate the mechanisms at work; thoughtful qualitative work to gain a deeper understanding of what happens on the shop floor. We selected this range because we believe that is what is needed to fill out our knowledge in this area. ASQ is proud to publish work tackling important topics in society, and we hope you enjoy this virtual collection.
Sincerely,
Lisa Cohen and Christine Beckman
Articles
Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense Against the 24/7 Work Culture
Irene Padavic, Robin J. Ely, and Erin M. Reid (March 2020 issue)
Gender-role Incongruity and Audience-based Gender Bias: An Examination of Networking among Entrepreneurs
Mabel Abraham (March 2020 issue)
Leaning Out: How Negative Recruitment Experiences Shape Women's Decisions to Compete for Executive Roles
Raina A. Brands and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (September 2017 issue)
Task Segregation as a Mechanism for Within-job Inequality: Women and Men of the Transportation Security Administration
Curtis K. Chan and Michel Anteby (June 2016 issue)
By Women and When is Women's Expertise Recognized? The Interactive Effects of Gender and Education in Science and Engineering Teams
Aparna Joshi (June 2014 issue)
Whose Jobs are These? The Impact of the Proportion of Female Managers on the Number of New Management Jobs Filled by Women versus Men
Lisa E. Cohen and Joseph P. Broschak (December 2013 issue)
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Christine Beckman
University of Southern California
Los Angeles CA
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