HENRICH R. GREVE
  • Home
  • Research
  • Journals
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Q&A

Organizational musings

Lean in or Lean out? Unfair Treatment Stops Women’s Careers in Many Ways

12/16/2016

 
Picture
We have by now learnt a lot about how women’s careers are held back by unfair evaluation and promotion procedures, and it gets worse at higher levels in the organization. The glass ceiling exists at some point before the executive suite, unless we are talking about the more symbolic executive offices that are seen as good women placeholders. Women know this too. A centerpiece in the discussion about women’s careers is the book “Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” by Cheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, which offers career advice for women to get ahead. Many women took the recipe-like advice as a way to behave more like men, in order to the get ahead the way men do. Others asked whether title “the Will to Lead” and its focus on women’s behaviors was a way of blaming the victims of a system set up to make them fail.
 
It is fair to say that the discussion of that book is a sideshow for most women with careers. They care about the hiring and promotion decisions that they are exposed to, and they doubt that these are fair. That makes sense: why should they be any different from the others?  Chances are that they have been hit by unfair promotion criteria at some point in their career.
 
Now research by Raina Brands and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo in Administrative Science Quarterly has revealed a cruel twist on this story. In turns out that people adapt their behaviors to the fairness of the system they are in. If they are treated fairly, they will reach for opportunities. If they are given signals that they belong in a group, they seek to join it. And once you think about those two mechanisms, it is obvious what happens to women seeking executive positions. They are not treated fairly and felt to belong, and the rejections from positions that they (often) should have gained discourages them from reaching for new opportunities. After all, who plays a losing hand? Naturally this accumulates over time, because more experience means more rejections, so exactly the women best placed to become executives are most likely to think they cannot reach that level.
 
This is not just a story about women. Unfair treatment can hold back a group in the short run. In the longer run it creates discouragement and resentment, and the members of the group starts holding themselves back. They are leaning out of the unfair system, looking for better places to work. The labor market gets split as they avoid the career paths with unfair treatment, and organizations need to fill their positions from an increasingly narrow and less talented pool of applicants. The firm that shows through its hiring that it has a problem with female, black, Muslim, and Hispanic job applicants will learn the long-term consequences of narrow hiring.
 
Brands, R. A., & Fernandez-Mateo, I. 2016. Leaning Out: How Negative Recruitment Experiences Shape Women’s Decisions to Compete for Executive Roles. Administrative Science Quarterly: forthcoming.

Marc Aaron Goldbach link
2/24/2017 05:03:08 am

That is true, women's career and promotion are being sacrifice in so many ways. It is very alarming news and it is happening all over the world. When experiencing this in the workplace, don't hesitate to seek a fair labor lawyer. Unfair treatment at work is illegal and wrong.


Comments are closed.

    Blog's objective

    This blog is devoted to discussions of how events in the news illustrate organizational research and can be explained by organizational theory. It is only updated when I have time to spare.

    Archives

    September 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    October 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    May 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
Photo from pixelmattic
  • Home
  • Research
  • Journals
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Q&A