GENDER INTERVENTIONS: A WHITE WOMAN’S WORLD? (SINGLE-TARGET VS. INTERSECTIONAL APPROACH)
Master Thesis, MScHRM
University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business
ABSTRACT
Gender inequality is still a widely recognized issue in business and many other facets of life. The main question that is central to this research therefore concerns the focus of initiatives (i.e. interventions) intended to foster women’s advancement at work. More specifically, organizations’ women’s initiatives are predominantly serving the needs of prototypical White women (i.e. using a single-target approach), or are organizations also taking intervention needs of other subgroups of women into account and therefore using a more intersectional approach? This question will be addressed by examining publicly available information on women’s initiatives on websites of organizations that signed the Charter of ‘Talent naar de Top’. For this examination, a word dictionary was designed in the LIWC program to measure the focus of women’s initiatives. The results show that the investigated organizations, indeed, mainly focused on the needs of prototypical White women and are therefore likely to primarily serve the intervention needs of White women.
INTRODUCTION
Gender inequality – or the gender gap – is a frequently discussed and still a topical phenomenon (e.g. Holman, Stuart-Fox & Hauser, 2018). This research will examine how organizations encounter and cope with gender inequality. Although the economic status gap between men and women has already been reduced to some extent, the differences between men and women are still present (Ponthieux & Meurs, 2015). According to the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE, 2019), advances in gender equality are developing slowly. In comparison with 2005, the Gender Equality Index score has increased with only 5.4 points (on a scale of 100). More practically, in the European labor force, only one in three managerial positions are held by women. Furthermore, as reported by The Robert Schuman Foundation (2019), board functions are filled with 15% of women holding executive roles, another 26% of women are represented in non-executive roles and only 6% of European CEO positions are held by women. Besides, regardless of their occupied positions, women, on average, earn less than men (Ponthieux & Meurs, 2015). Organizations are therefore increasingly recognizing the gender gap and subsequently implementing more and more initiatives to address this gap (e.g. leadership trainings, network groups; Bilimoria, Joy & Liang, 2008; Ely, Ibarra & Kolb, 2011; Wang, 2009). Nonetheless, these initiatives do not always work effectively (e.g. Bertrand, Black, Jensen & Lleras-Muney, 2018; Bilimoria, Joy & Liang, 2008).
approaches to tackle gender inequality require more intersectional considerations (Collins, 2002; Zinn & Dill,1996).
“Intersectionality” refers to one’s social identities that are mutually constitutive (Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013). This means that intersectionality points to the interactions between one’s social identities and views these identities in relation to each other (Shield, 2016). According to Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory (1982) “social identity” can be interpreted as that part of the individual’s self-concept which is derived from their membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance devoted to that membership. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) was the first scholar to coin the term of intersectionality, introducing the notion that a single-inequality analysis excludes groups who experience discrimination due to an interplay of inequalities (Calasanti & Giles, 2018). For example, Black woman could be stereotyped in multiple ways: as a Black person (e.g. lazy), as a woman (e.g. shy), or as a Black woman (aggressive; Bowleg, 2012; Ghavami & Peplau, 2013; Wong, 2018). Hence, the perspective aims to create awareness about the fact that an individual’s gender cannot be looked at without considering one’s social structure/ identity (Shield, 2016). Therefore, by taking an intersectional approach with regard to gender interventions (i.e., taking several social identities such as race and gender, into account) minority women might benefit from it more. To my knowledge, however, the intersectional approach concerning gender interventions has primarily received conceptual scholarly attention, thus strong empirical support is still needed (e.g. Marfelt, 2016). This study will investigate the premise of whether organizations indeed neglect intersectional differences in their gender interventions. Hence, the following research question will be central:
First, this research will start discussing the research question in the light of the corresponding theoretical background currently available in the literature. Next, there will be an explanation of how and why the research question will be tested. In short, the procedure will consist of examining the online public information of the organizations that signed the diversity charter from ‘Talent naar de Top’ concerning their diversity and women’s inclusion programs. In this examination, the representation of the intervention needs of White women versus the needs of women of color were systematically coded. For this purpose, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) program was used, which is a linguistic inquiry and word count program that can calculate frequencies regarding coded words that are related to particular intervention needs committed to women’s initiatives (Pennebaker, Booth, Boyd & Francis, 2015). Based on this data, conclusions were drawn regarding the prevalence of single-target versus intersectional interventions among organizations that are dedicated to women’s initiatives.
By answering my research question, the gender literature will be informed about the approaches that gender interventions seem to take and highlight to what extent this approach serves the needs of different groups of women. These results contribute to the literature by informing the debate on whether or not organizations should adopt more intersectional diversity interventions. A confirmative answer to this question implies that organizations indeed do focus primarily on White women’s needs, and could consider intersectional needs more often when developing gender interventions to stimulate women’s career development (Cook, Heppner & O’Brien, 2002). At last, it is important to note that workforce diversity is
inextricably linked to inequality issues (DiTomaso, Post & Parks-Yancy, 2007). Therefore, studies in inequality are key to encourage diversity issues (e.g. gender ratios; DiTomaso et al., 2007). Hence, to alleviate barriers to women, research into gender inequality is considerably relevant to practice.
Social Role Theory
Drawing on existing literature, the gender gap can be explained by existing gender stereotypes and gender biases that hinder women’s career advancement (Caleo & Heilman, 2019). According to Social Role Theory (Eagly & Wood, 2016), gender stereotypes and roles are formed by observations of behaviors of men and women, inferred with their corresponding positions. The general view concerning men in comparison to women leads to men being characterized as ‘agentic’ (e.g. being assertive, dominant, competitive) and women being characterized as ‘communal’ (e.g. being friendly, unselfish, emotionally expressive; Bakan, 1966). These perceptions have led to the so-called ‘think manager-think male’ (TMTM) stereotype (Schein, 2001), where men are perceived to possess more characteristics associated with managerial success (i.e. agentic leadership behaviors) than women (Schein, Mueller, Lituchy & Liu, 1996). To comply with this TMTM stereotype, female leaders are generally encouraged to act more in line with masculine leadership behaviors (i.e. assertive, dominant, task-oriented; Heilman & Okimoto, 2007; Scheuer & Loughlin, 2018). Accordingly, many of the gender interventions that aim to reduce gender biases tend to focus on changing these perceptions by teaching women how to behave more agentic (i.e. making women feel more confident, empowered; Caleo & Heilman, 2019; Martin & Philips, 2017).
Single-target Approach: Over-representation of Whiteness
The aforementioned distinctive gender stereotypes, however, cause organizations to view ‘women’ as one homogeneous, generalized group of people (Shield, 2016) and serve a
just one group. Research shows that stereotypical beliefs about other group memberships may or may not align with typical gender role beliefs (e.g. being communal; Eagly & Wood, 2016). For example, gendered beliefs have found to map closely onto how typical White women are seen, but communality is not believed to align well with the image of Black women (Ghavami & Peplau, 2013). In other words, White women are far more associated with communion and the lack of agency than women from other backgrounds.
Indeed, according to Remedios & Snyder (2015), gender issues are largely considered and researched from the White women’s perspective, so the observed gender stereotypes reflect them to be the prototype and may lead to their implicit radicalization as a target group (Cole, 2009; Koenig & Eagly, 2014). This may lead to gender equality interventions that are often only tailored to White women as gender equality movements regularly involve only White women (Rose-Redwood & Azaryahu, 2017). For example, Liu (2017) states that according to existing literature, diversity management is viewed as a “repackaging” of equality to solely support the White workforce. Additionally, literature has found that diversity management programs tend to ignore unequal structures that do not fit “white normativity”. That is, whiteness is often the dominant element of culture and a determinant of
prevailing norms of communication and behavior (Ward, 2008). Hence, to guide women to the top by using a ‘single-target’ approach focused on the ‘prototypical’ women, White women are most likely to benefit from it (Wong, 2018).
Intersectional Approach: Considering the Needs of Women of Color
gender role aligning with typical White women (e.g. being emotional, sensitive; Eagly, Nater, Miller, Kaufmann & Sczesny, 2019), might not appeal to women of color. As a consequence, by mainly focusing on gender interventions on White women, these interventions may not fit with minority women’s experiences (Knights & Omanović, 2016; Rosette, Ponce de Leon,
Koval, & Harrison, 2018).
Evidence for this notion stems from literature showing that different ethnic groups of women experience different stereotypes regarding their race and gender (Rosette, Koval, Ma, & Livingstone, 2016). Black women, for example, tend to diverge from the standard perception of women, and are seen to be more assertive, loud, and less sensitive (Ghavami & Peplau, 2013). This may have several implications for women’s needs in gender intervention programs. Certain subgroups of women (e.g. Black women) are not likely to benefit from interventions tailored at agency, since those subgroups are already believed to exhibit these traits. Instead, Black women could experience ‘agentic backlash’ (e.g. Rudman, 1998) when further use of this behavior causes them to be viewed as becoming too assertive and even aggressive at work.
approach would consider every personal situation on a case-by-case basis, thereby overlooking how societal stereotypes and larger structures are contributing to the experiences of having multiple versus one single marginalized status.
Agency vs. Multiculturalism. In line with the intersectional approach, Wong, Kirby, Ryan & Rink (2019) studied whether, given the unique stereotypes attached to them, and unique experiences at work, women of color hold different intervention needs relative to White women. This study indeed found that Black and Hispanic women hold more ‘multiculturalism’ intervention needs (i.e. multicultural representation), while White women held more ‘agentic’ needs. Asian women held both needs. Like intersectionality, ‘multiculturalism needs’ point to the appreciation of the impact that individual differences can give (i.e., race, class, age, gender; Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013; Melear, 1995), while more traditional ‘agency’ related needs refer to the perspective of women that they should receive help in alleviating the belief that they are not agentic, and hence lack leadership potential (Rosette, Koval, Ma & Livingstone, 2016). In other words, women of color compared to White women did actually prefer more multicultural representation (i.e. intersectional considerations; Wong et al., 2019), providing evidence that intervention needs do differ between racial groups of women.
In conclusion, by taking an intersectional approach towards gender interventions, more inclusiveness will be created with respect to one’s different needs that are depending on their unique set of social categories and preferences. Nevertheless, it is expected that today’s women’s initiatives focus predominantly on the requirements of the stereotypical women.
Altogether, the following hypothesis will be central in this research:
H1: Women’s initiatives are typically serving the needs of White women (i.e. agency-related topics) more than the needs of women of color (i.e. multiculturalism-agency-related topics).
Sample
In order to investigate whether organizations serve the agency needs of primarily White women or also the multiculturalism needs of women of color, websites of certain organizations were screened. In particular, organizations of “Talent naar de Top” were screened during this research, since these organizations signed a charter promoting women’s representation in (sub)top management positions (Talent naar de Top, 2019a). The mission of Talent naar de Top, on their website, is as follows (translated): “our mission is diversity and inclusivity in the top to establish norms” (Talent naar de Top, 2019b). Organizations that have signed the diversity charter are part of the Talent naar de Top “community” (Talent naar de Top, 2019c).
Until now, 186 organizations have signed the Talent naar de Top gender diversity charter. Organizations operate in many different industries, varying from Healthcare (e.g. hospitals), Education (e.g. universities), Finance (e.g. banks, mortgage brokers), Governmental agencies (e.g. ministries, provinces) until Production and Retail (e.g. supermarkets, road construction; Talent naar de Top, 2019c).
Procedure
which no information about women (initiatives) had been found, were excluded from further screening. This resulted in a final sample of N = 94 organizations. Thereafter, a word dictionary was created (based on Singh & Point, 2006) to analyze the obtained data. The procedure of the word dictionary development is explained in the following section.
Construction of coding scheme
the word dictionary. Based on this procedure, a series of words were added to, rearranged to, or excluded from the word dictionary. At last, given the fact that some websites were developed in English and some websites in Dutch, all words in the word dictionary were also translated into Dutch words using digital translation platforms and joint discussions (based on Singh & Point, 2006) with outsiders (e.g. non-biased peers).
Then, after the aforementioned development of the word dictionary and the data gathering process, the LIWC program was used to scan the data and calculate frequencies of words that presented the percentage that a category was represented relative to the total amount of words that the data (from a particular website) consisted of (Pennebaker et al., 2015; LIWC,2015). In this scanning procedure with the LIWC program, the websites were scanned in one single round and each relevant category was tested with one batch of words. By utilizing the frequencies, the prevalence of each intervention need within and across organizations could be determined. The results for the categories were shown on a continuous range, symbolizing the frequencies.
Key Dependent Measures.
Agency. Agency orients people to the self, one’s abilities and relates to assertiveness, ambition and competitiveness (Eagly et al., 2019). The 196 words developed for this category aimed to measure whether women’s initiatives focused on Agency. Examples of coded words are: ambitious, assertiveness, confidence and leadership.
Multiculturalism. This category refers to the recognition and attention to people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds (Dewing & Leman, 2006). The 141 words developed for this category aimed to test to what extent women’s initiatives focused on this notion. Examples of coded words are: background, culture, ethnicity and minority.
Exploratory Measures.1
Competence. Competence refers to the ability to invent or develop new things and covers traits related to intelligence (Eagly et al., 2019). This category seemed a relevant topic to include in the research since perceptions (not necessarily needs) about this topic differ among subgroups of women. Whereas women, in general, have increased overall perceptions when it comes to competence compared to men (Eagly et al., 2019), there are reasons to assume that this finding has to be nuanced among subgroups of women. Specifically, Black women are typically perceived as less competent relative to White and Asian women (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002; Rosette, Koval, Ma & Livingstone, 2016). 177 competence-related words were developed in the word dictionary. Examples of coded words are: achieving, creative, intelligent and organized.
Stereotype Awareness. This category aimed to test whether organizations paid explicit attention to (i.e. were aware of) the existence of stereotypes and biases towards women. Stereotypes refer to one’s beliefs and cognitions that characterize people based solely on their group membership (Fiske, 1993). In line with the Social Role Theory, women are faced with stereotypes (i.e., about their gender; Eagly & Wood, 2016). Besides, according to the stereotype content model, people from different races face stereotypes regarding their background (Fiske et al., 2002). Hence, this category pointed to women more generally, since women are experiencing multiple stereotypes at work that might bother their career advancement. Ergo, this category paid attention to general statements of stereotypes and in the analyses, or could otherwise explain additional variance. First, I scored 36 words that reflect very low
scores on agency (or lack thereof), such as ‘mute, ‘shy’, ‘ hesitant’, etc. Conversely, I also scored 55 words that
reflect dominance (as an extrapolation of agency). Examples are ‘aggressive’, ‘dominant’, ‘pushy’, etc. (Eagly & Kakau, 2002). Next, I coded 76 communal oriented words, to capture the gender stereotype that women are directed to others and their well-being, and generally reflect the typical view of White women (Eagly et al., 2019; Ghavami & Peplau, 2013). Examples are kind, fragile, sensitive, social, etc. Fourth, I developed a
distributive fairness category that captured 23 words reflective of the unfair treatment of women in
biases and did not include specific stereotype content referring to (subgroups of) women. 42 words were coded for this category. Examples of coded words are: bias, ethnicity, perception and prejudice.
Firm Control Measures
Control variables were inserted in this research to determine if there are alternative explanations for the use of single-target interventions towards women’s initiatives. Three firm characteristics had been taken as control variables.
Firm size. Given the fact that ‘firm size’ has a positive effect on the organization’s profitability (Lee, 2009), a small organization that has a lower budget might be unable to invest much in several, different targeted initiatives in contrast to a greater organization. Hence, an organization’s size could be an indicator of not taking intersectional considerations regarding women’s initiatives. This variable was measured by the total number of employees that an organization had (Wagner, 1995). More specifically, by means of public available information like the organization’s website or Orbis (i.e. a database of global company information accessed by university; 2020) the most recent publicly available firm size was derived. Only in few cases where this could not be found, numbers from Google were used. The numbers of employees’ results are shown in a continuous range.
Global vs. Local Firm Focus. Considering the fact that gender equality has made advances in different sizes across different countries (Eden & Gupta, 2017), it would be interesting to see whether local or international organizations influenced the results regarding their women’s initiatives. This variable was measured by considering whether the
organization has locations abroad, based on website information or Orbis. Whether the organization possessed only locations in the Netherlands, the firm was characterized as ‘local = 0’. Whether the firm also possessed locations outside the Netherlands, the firm was characterized as ‘international =1’.
Analysis
In this research, all analyses were computed in the analytical computer software program: SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version 26). Based on the descriptive statistics, the prevalence of the tested categories could already be investigated. Further, by means of the Pearson correlation, possible associations across categories and between control variables could be found. Besides, in order to find more nuanced results, the continuous categories were clustered in categorical variables and tested by using the cross-tabulation analysis in combination with the chi-square statistic.
RESULTS Descriptive Statistics
mean (M = .44), a relatively high standard deviation (SD = .49) and a high degree of Skewness (2.06). These results indicate that, on average, website content consisted of 0.44% multiculturalism-related words. Lastly, pointing to the correlation effects, it was found that Multiculturalism is significantly correlated with Stereotype Awareness (r = .22; p < .05). And Agency was significantly associated with the firm characteristics Firm size (r = .24; p < .05) and Industry (r = .23; p < .05).
TABLE 1
Descriptive Statistics and Pearson Correlation
Variable Mean SD Skewness 1 2 3 4 5 6
1. Agency 2.17 .99 .72 2. Multiculturalism .44 .49 2.06 .19 3. Competence 1.65 .93 1.06 .19 .03 4. Stereotype Awareness 1.17 .75 .64 .13 .22* .01 5. Firm size 48970 93606 .24* .16 .14 -.01 6. Industry 1.73 .44 .23* -.03 .06 .02 .27** 7. Global vs. Local Firm focus .65 .48 .20 .06 .09 .08 .35** .71** N= 94 organizations. * p < .05, ** p < .01. Hypothesis Testing
The conclusion that could be drawn out of the above-mentioned results is that Agency is the most frequently mentioned category in women’s initiatives on the examined websites. More specifically, when examining the website content of all 94 organizations, Agency is shown 203.74 times in terms of percentages, whereas Multiculturalism is shown 41.49 times2. Although the sum of Agency and Multiculturalism already reflect a large and remarkable difference, a little side-note has to be made here. Since the length (in words) of categories varied (i.e. Agency counts 25.2% of total dictionary words whereas Multiculturalism counts
2
18.1%) this is not a completely fair comparison. To adjust for this, I corrected for the difference in words, and the total sum of organizations mentioning multiculturalism-related words comes down to 57.67 times. Hence, still a large difference suggesting that the organizations’ gender initiatives seem strongly focused on the needs of White women.
To confirm this assumption, further analyses were executed. Specifically, to test whether organizations primarily focused on just one predominant need in their programs or also focused on the multicultural need simultaneously, I divided the organizations into clusters of ‘high in both needs’ (Agency and Multiculturalism), ‘high in Agency, but low in Multiculturalism needs’, ‘low in Agency needs, high in Multiculturalism needs’ and ‘low in both needs’. For each category, this was done by dividing the continuous categories, representing the percentages, in categorical variables by using the ‘mean’ as cut-off point (i.e. low < mean > high)3. Organizations that are ‘high’ on a certain category can be classified as scoring ‘above-average’. Apart from that, for comparative reasons, the categories were first standardized (i.e. using z-scores) since they differed in the number of words coded (as mentioned above). Standardizing the categories solved this issue (e.g. Robinson, Boyd & Fetterman, 2014; Newman, Pennebaker, Berry & Richards, 2003).
Based on the newly clustered data, I performed a cross-tabulation with chi-square. At first, it is worth noting that 50% of organizations mentioning agency-related words could be classified as having an above-average focus on Agency, whereas just 36% of the organizations mentioning multiculturalism-related words could be classified as having an above-average focus. Hence, not only are there more organizations that seem to focus on the agency need, these organizations also highlight this need on their website. Then, by looking at the clustered categories, the results demonstrated that 28% of organizations exclusively focused (highly) on Agency needs, whereas 14% of organizations exclusively focused
3
(highly) on Multiculturalism needs, again a remarkable difference. Of the remaining organizations, 22% focused on Agency and Multiculturalism simultaneously, and 36% did not focus on any of these two dimensions. The chi-square analyses demonstrated that these differences between clusters were marginally significant: χ2 (1,N = 94) = 2.95, p = .086. Hence, relative to organizations simultaneously focusing on both categories (22%), the cluster of organizations exclusively focusing on Agency is greater (28%). Together, these results show that Agency was consistently the dominant reference category mentioned by the organizations, suggesting that their interventions primarily tailored the needs of typical White women.
I checked whether the aforementioned findings held when the firm characteristics were taken into account (i.e. firm size, industry, and global vs. local firm focus). I included each firm characteristic in a cross-tabulation analysis separately as independent factor. In each analysis the overall effect of the cross-tabulation remained marginally significant. The analyses where industry and global firm focus were included demonstrated that these control variables did not vary significantly with agency and multiculturalism, while the hypothesized effect for the salience of agency over multiculturalism remained marginal significant. That is, more organizations are focusing on agency rather than focusing on multiculturalism or agency and multiculturalism. However, the analysis that included firm size revealed that this control variable did have a significant impact on this pattern, such that it only remained significant in smaller organizations (i.e. below 10,000 employees, p < .05). I will elaborate on this unexpected finding in the discussion.
Supplementary Analysis
not gain any significant results, indicating that an organization’s focus on Multiculturalism does not systematically lead to a higher or lower focus on these two categories. As for Agency, cross-tabulations with Competence and Stereotype Awareness did yield significant results, signalling that organizations mentioning agency-related words also tend to focus on competence and stereotype awareness4. The most relevant results are highlighted below.
First, in analyzing the cross-tabulation with chi-square it became clear that 47% of organizations could be classified as having an above-average focus on Competence. Then, it was interesting to see that organizations that focused on Agency and Competence simultaneously counted for 30%, whereas both categories were mentioned less in isolation (i.e. respectively 20% and 17% of organizations mentioned exclusively Agency and Competence). The chi-square analyses demonstrated that these differences between clusters were significant: χ2
(1, N = 94) = 6.15, p < .05. In short, the percentage of organizations simultaneously focusing on both categories (30%), was higher than the cluster of organizations exclusively focusing on Agency (20%). In other words, women’s initiatives were significantly, mainly targeting Agency and Competence related needs simultaneously.
Second, regarding the cross-tabulation analysis, it could be found that 42% of organizations showed an above-average focus on Stereotypes Awareness. Next, it was interesting to see that 28% of organizations focussed on Agency and Stereotypes Awareness simultaneously, whereas both categories were mentioned less in isolation (i.e. respectively 22% and 14% of organizations exclusively focused Agency and Stereotypes Awareness). The chi-square analysis demonstrated that these differences between the clusters were significant: χ2
(1, N = 94) = 7.41, p < .01.
Together, the percentages of organizations simultaneously focusing on Agency and the other exploratory category, were in both analyses found to be higher than the cluster of
4
organizations exclusively focusing on Agency. In other words, women’s initiatives significantly and mainly targeted Agency in combination with Competence or Stereotypes Awareness related needs.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Gender inequality is a widely recognized issue in business and many other facets of life (Holman, Stuart-Fox & Hauser, 2018). This research aimed to examine how gender inequality in organizations might overlook certain non-prototypical subgroups of women. Specifically, the research question addressed whether organizations primarily use a single-target approach (by more serving the needs of White women) versus an intersectional approach in their gender interventions (serving the needs of women of color). Building on gender and intersectionality literature, I examined the focus of initiatives (i.e. interventions) intended to foster women’s advancement in organizations.
to act more agentic. Hence, agency-related intervention needs will more aptly serve the needs of White women as found by Wong et al. (2019).
However, this may not be the case for other ethnic groups of women. For example, while stereotypes regarding Asian women are intertwined with lacking agency too, they also face stereotypes that are intertwined with being perceived as invisible and foreign (Mukkamala & Suyemoto, 2018). As a result, they will not be fully served by agency-related women’s initiatives. Equally, Wong et al. (2019) found that Asian women require multiculturalism-related needs besides agency-related needs. Moreover, Black women are found to be stereotyped with being aggressive, dominant, loud and religious, and their stereotypes most distinctly do not match with the prototypical at all (i.e. being communal; Ghavami & Peplau, 2013). Subsequently, Black women will not be served with agency-related gender interventions since they already show behavior that is associated with agency. Instead, Black women rather require multiculturalism-related needs as Wong et al (2019) found in their research.
positively related to firm size (Arnegger, Hofmann, Pull & Vetter. 2014), this would further explain the aforementioned finding. Arguing here that smaller organizations possibly have a workforce consisting of fewer different nationalities and therefore engage in less different initiatives (i.e. aimed to serve different subgroups of women).
Lastly, besides hypothesis testing as outlined above, the supplementary analyses showed that women’s initiatives focused on competence and the awareness of stereotypes too. More specifically, these two topics turned out to have a relationship with agency-related topics in initiatives, considering the finding that agency was significantly used more frequently in combination with both of these two topics than in isolation.
Theoretical Implications
Together, these findings add several contributions to the literature focused on gender inequality and intersectionality. As organizations are implementing several initiatives aimed to foster women’s advancements (Bilimoria, Joy & Liang, 2008), these initiatives do not always pay off with the desired results (e.g. Bertrand, Black, Jensen & Lleras-Muney, 2018; Bilimoria, Joy & Liang, 2008). In an attempt to address this issue, this research contributed to literature by theoretically illustrating the link between intersectionality and Whiteness in relation to gender interventions. As was expected that most initiatives were designed according to the prevailing stereotype of women (i.e. communion and lacking agency) and therefore primarily serve the needs of White women (Koenig & Eagly, 2014; Rose-Redwood & Azaryahu, 2017), organizations would probably aim to organize initiatives in such a way that women learn how to behave more agentic (Caleo & Heilman, 2019; Martin & Philips, 2017). However, since these initiatives may not fit with minority women’s experiences (Knights & Omanović, 2016; Rosette, Ponce de Leon, Koval, & Harrison, 2018), an intersectional approach to advance women may be more favourable to minority women.
that women’s initiatives are mainly organized in one, dominant design that primarily serves the needs of the prototypical women (i.e. White women) by focusing on agency-related subjects. Supporting the belief of several researchers, as they proclaim that the prototypical White woman is implicitly representing the prevalent stereotypical gender role of women when it comes to gender issues (e.g. Cole, 2009; Rosette, Ponce de Leon, Koval & Harrison, 2018). Moreover, this conclusion might serve as an additional underlining of the overrepresentation of Whiteness in social facets of life too, since this study confirmed a case of ‘whitewashed’ approaches aimed to address women’s issues. Specifically, building upon pre-existing literature that speaks of “White Normativity” in diversity management (e.g. Ward, 2008; Naidoo, 2019). According to Grimes (2002), White people are implicitly presented as more important and more ‘normal’, resulting in a reinforcement of Whiteness (privileges) in behaviors and beliefs without being explicitly conscious of the dominance of Whiteness itself.
Besides the aforementioned theoretical contributions derived from hypothesis testing, note that I also executed supplementary analyses with several exploratory categories. Two of these categories (i.e. Competence and Stereotype Awareness) stood out, since they remarkably often coincided with Agency. These findings will be discussed in the future research directions. At last, I included a range of other exploratory categories (see footnote 1) besides Competence and Stereotype Awareness. However, those categories did not gain a lot of results. Ergo, Competence and Stereotype Awareness can be considered as dominant categories. Still, in this regard, Agency actually stood out the most, implying a robust confirmation of the hypothesis.
Altogether, this research shines some light on how and why gender interventions might not work out as effectively as desired. By providing input for research into the field of gender inequality, this study could be useful for theory development.
Although this study has several strengths, such as illustrating that White women seem to be primarily served by women’s initiatives, I acknowledge some limitations that further research in gender inequality could address to develop this field in literature. At first, the findings concerning hypothesis testing were marginally significant which implies that the finding of women’s initiatives that focus more on agency than multiculturalism, may raise questions about the usefulness of this finding. Yet, the differences between agency and multiculturalism, in terms of descriptive statistics and the total sum up of percentages that the categories counted, were also large and remarkable, still advocating the assumption that White women are primarily served by initiatives. Further, most of the analyses with control variables did not vary significantly with agency and multiculturalism. Also in controlling for supplementary analyses results, the effects were mixed. Hence, across the board, the controlling effects were not very coherent. However, these outcomes are quite understandable, given the relatively small sample size in this research (N=94) and the claim that greater sample sizes increase statistical power (e.g. Cohen, 1992). On top of that, I used cross-tabulation analyses, that weighs every factor as an independent factor regardless of their function as controlling measure.
Berry & Richards, 2003), it might be that the small exploratory categories in this study would automatically lead to lower results in terms of descriptive statistics. Nonetheless, I found that this was not always true since the category Stereotype Awareness only consisted of 42 words (i.e. representing 5.4% of the total word dictionary) and still showed relatively high results in terms of descriptive statistics (i.e. M= 1.17; sum = 109.57 times in terms of percentages).
Third, although the use of websites as a source of data can be considered beneficial in the sense that the necessary data can usually be collected from every organization in contrast to surveys where low response rates are a possible issue (Singh & Point, 2006), this has still led to a sample size of 94 organizations since not every organization covered information concerning their women’s initiatives or perceptions of women on their website. Future research might consider other study designs to examine the research question and additional questions regarding gender interventions in organizations. For example, a more intense data gathering process would require to personally ask organizations permission to view and use their documents about women’s initiatives. Subsequently, those data will probably be more fruitful and detailed in contrast to website content, since management documents about programs are likely to consist of an action plan and objectives (e.g. Owen & Lambert, 1995) which might clearly reveal what kind of focus a women initiative pursues. On another note, future researchers could also consider interviewing HR officers that deal with women’s issues in their organizations, to find out what focus their women’s initiatives have or/ and what perceptions they have towards the gender gap. Yet, in this regard, this research might serve as an initial step into the identification of issues regarding gender interventions.
result, those organizations will probably feel the need to engage in multicultural interventions as it will be more required by a more diverse workforce. On the contrary, the more homogeneous organizations will probably keep investing in the agency-related gender interventions, while they might benefit more from an intersectional approach in order to widen their focus and to create a more diverse workforce. Hence, it might be interesting to explore further whether there is a relationship between an organization’s population and their intervention focus. This might be a relevant issue to explore further because, when multicultural organizations keep investing in intersectional initiatives and homogeneous organizations only keep investing in single-target interventions focused on agency, this might subsequently lead to a reinforcing system. More precisely, as it is found that minority women are more willing to work and apply for organizations that are engaged in multicultural initiatives (Avery & McKay, 2006; Roberson, 2019), this might reinforce the diversity levels in organizations. In other words, homogeneous organizations that are not attractive to minority women will attract less of them and, conversely, organizations that are attractive to minority women will keep attracting them. As a consequence, the proportion of cultural diversity in homogeneous organizations will therefore remain at lower levels. And, subsequently, those organizations will still be less likely to feel the need to engage in multicultural women’s initiatives. Hence, in understanding the reasons for organizations to address gender inequality by using multicultural-related women’s initiatives, a critical evaluation of different practices and their impact may provide new (underlying) insights in effectively downsizing the gender gap at work (Roberson, 2019).
interpreted in the light of agency and therefore refer to a focus on White women. Particularly, while competence represents one of the male stereotypes and is often partnered with agency in literature (Eagly et al., 2019; Abele et al., 2016), women’s initiatives targeted at agency may be intertwined with competence. Ergo, since agency-related initiatives are assumed to focus on White women, initiatives focusing on agency and competence might indicate that they are ‘whitewashed’ too by focusing on White women. The same goes for Stereotype Awareness. As this category also turned out to be associated with agency-related topics in initiatives, it might be that stereotypes are being interpreted in the light of agency and therefore only emphasize general gendered stereotypes that White women probably face, rather than racial stereotypes that teach women how to deal with racial and cultural stereotypes at work.
results are unclear. Hence, further research is needed to explore the intention of competence-related and stereotype awareness-competence-related gender interventions.
Practical implications
Although organizations and mankind recognize the gender gap, this is still a critical and unresolved issue (e.g. Holman, Stuart-Fox & Hauser, 2018; Ponthieux & Meurs, 2015). This study approached this issue by examining gender inequality from the perspective of gender interventions in organizations, thus making an immediate contribution to practice. By illustrating the main focus that organizations in my sample seem to have with regard to their gender interventions, it is practically interesting to see that organizations tend to focus on the prototypical woman (i.e. White women). Indicating that other subgroups of women (i.e. minority women) seem to be overlooked in their attempts to climb up the ladder. Hence, for managers and directors in organizations, it might be interesting to reconsider their women’s initiatives with this finding in mind. Accordingly, the finding suggesting that not all women will be served by the current women’s initiatives, may (partly) explain why some of the interventions turned out to be unsuccessful (Koenig & Eagly, 2014; Bertrand, Black, Jensen & Lleras-Muney, 2018).
Altogether, the recommendations made by this research may explain the ineffective working of gender interventions in organizations and/or may contribute to new insights for practice on how to address gender inequality in the future.
REFERENCES
Abele, A. E., Hauke, N., Peters, K., Louvet, E., Szymkow, A., & Duan, Y. 2016. Facets of the fundamental content dimensions: Agency with competence and assertiveness— Communion with warmth and morality. Frontiers in psychology, 7: 1810.
Arnegger, M., Hofmann, C., Pull, K., & Vetter, K. 2014. Firm size and board diversity. Journal of Management & Governance, 18(4): 1109-1135.
Auspurg, K., Hinz, T., & Sauer, C. 2017. Why should women get less? Evidence on the gender pay gap from multifactorial survey experiments. American Sociological Review, 82(1): 179-210.
Avery, D. R., & McKay, P. F. 2006. Target practice: An organizational impression management approach to attracting minority and female job applicants. Personnel Psychology, 59(1): 157-187.
Bakan, D. 1966. The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Baltodano, J. C., Carlson, S., Jackson, L. W., & Mitchell, W. 2012. Networking to
leadership in higher education: National and state-based programs and networks for developing women. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 14(1): 62-78. Bercovitz, J., & Mitchell, W. 2007. When is more better? The impact of business scale and
scope on long-term business survival, while controlling for profitability. Strategic Management Journal, 28: 61–80.
Bilimoria, D., Joy, S., & Liang, X. 2008. Breaking barriers and creating inclusiveness: lessons of organizational transformation to advance women faculty in academic science and engineering. Human Resource Management, 47(3): 423-441.
Bowleg, L. 2012. The problem with the phrase women and minorities: Intersectionality-an important theoretical framework for public health. American Journal of Public Health, 102(7): 1267–1273. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.300750
Calasanti, T., & Giles, S. 2018. The challenge of intersectionality. Generations, 41(4): 69- 74.
Caleo, S., & Heilman, M. E. 2019. What could go wrong? Some unintended consequences of gender bias interventions. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 7(1): 71-80. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. 2013. Toward a field of intersectionality studies:
Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4): 785-810.
Cohen, J. 1992. A power primer. Psychological bulletin, 112(1): 155-159.
Cole, E. R. 2009. Intersectionality and research in psychology. American psychologist, 64(3): 170.
Collins, P. H. 2002. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge.
Cook, E. P., Heppner, M. J., & O’Brien, K. M. 2002. Career development of women of color and white women: Assumptions, conceptualization, and interventions from an
ecological perspective. The Career Development Quarterly, 50(4):291-305.
Dewing, M., & Leman, M. 2006. Canadian multiculturalism. Ottawa: Library of Parliament, Parliamentary Research Branch.
Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. 2002. Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological review, 109(3): 573-598.
Eagly, A.H., Nater, C., Miller, D.I., Kaufmann, M. & Sczesny, S. 2019. Gender Stereotypes Have changed: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of U.S. Public Opinion Polls From 1946 to 2018. American Psychological Association. 75(3), 301-315.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000494
Eagly, A. H., & Wood, W. 2016. Social role theory of sex differences. The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of gender and sexuality studies, 1-3.
Eden, L., & Gupta, S.2017. Culture and context matter: gender in international business and management. Cross Cultural and Strategic Management, Special Issue on" Gender in International Business and Management.
Ely, R. J., Ibarra, H., & Kolb, D. M. 2011. Taking gender into account: Theory and design for women's leadership development programs. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 10(3): 474-493.
Fiske, S. T. 1993. Controlling other people. The impact of power on stereotyping. American Psychologist, 48: 621-628.
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. 2002. A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82: 878–902. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514 .82.6.878
Gender Equality Index. 2019. About Index. Accessed online https://eige.europa.eu/gender- equality-index/about Viewed January, 6 2020.
Ghavami, N., & Peplau, L. A. 2013. An intersectional analysis of gender and ethnic
Grimes, D. S. 2002. Challenging the status quo? Whiteness in the diversity management literature. Management Communication Quarterly, 15(3): 381-409.
He, J. C., Kang, S. K., Tse, K., & Toh, S. M. 2019. Stereotypes at work: Occupational stereotypes predict race and gender segregation in the workforce. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 115 , 103318.
Helms, I. E., & Cook, D. A. 1999. Using race and culture in counseling and psychotherapy. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Heilman, M. E., & Okimoto, T. G. 2007. Why are women penalized for success at male tasks?: The implied communality deficit. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(1): 81– 92.
Holman, L., Stuart-Fox, D., & Hauser, C. E. 2018. The gender gap in science: How long until women are equally represented? PLoS biology, 16(4): e2004956.
Jean-Marie, G., & Brooks, J. S. 2011. Chapter 5 Mentoring and Supportive Networks for Women of Color in Academe'. In Women of Color in Higher Education: Changing Directions and New Perspectives: 91-108. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Kadish, S. S., Mayer, E. L., Jackman, D. M., Pomerantz, M., Brady, L., Dimitriadis, A., ... &
Wagner, A. J. 2018. Implementation to Optimization: A Tailored, Data-Driven Approach to Improve Provider Efficiency and Confidence in Use of the Electronic Medical Record. Journal of oncology practice, 14(7): 421-428.
Kline, R. B. 1998. Principles and practice of structural equation modeling. New York: Guilford.
Knights, D., & Omanovic, V. 2016. (Mis)managing diversity: exploring the dangers diversity management orthodoxy. Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: An International Journal, 35(1): 5-16. doi: 10.1108/EDI-03-2014-0020
psychology, 107(3): 371.
Kreuter, M. W., Strecher, V. J., & Glassman, B. 1999. One size does not fit all: the case for tailoring print materials. Annals of behavioral medicine, 21(4): 276-283.
Landrine, H. 1995. Introduction: Cultural diversity, contextualism, and feminist psychology. In H. Landrine (Eds.), Bringing cultural diversity to feminist psychology: Theory, research, and practice : 1-20. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Langin, K. 2019. Women of color face double dose of bias. Science, 364(6444): 921-922. Lee, J. 2009. Does size matter in firm performance? Evidence from US public firms.
international Journal of the economics of Business, 16(2): 189-203.
Lips, H. M. 2016. The gender pay gap and the wellbeing of working women. In Handbook on Well-Being of Working Women:141-157. Springer, Dordrecht.
Liu, H. 2017. Undoing Whiteness: The Dao of Anti‐racist Diversity Practice. Gender, Work & Organization, 24(5): 457-471.
LIWC.2015. How it works. Accessed online http://liwc.wpengine.com/how-it-works/ Viewed March, 12 2020.
Long, C. P. 2016. Mapping the main roads to fairness: Examining the managerial context of fairness promotion. Journal of Business Ethics, 137(4): 757-783.
Lyons, S. T., Duxbury, L. E., & Higgins, C. A. 2006. A comparison of the values and
commitment of private sector, public sector, and parapublic sector employees. Public administration review, 66(4): 605-618.
Marfelt, M. M. 2016. Grounded Intersectionality: Key Tensions, a Methodological Framework, and Implications for Diversity Research. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 35(1): 31-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-05-2014-0034
environments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 142: 28-44.
Melear, C. 1995. Multiculturalism in science education. The American Biology Teacher: 21-26.
Mukkamala, S., & Suyemoto, K. L. 2018. Racialized sexism/sexualized racism: A
multimethod study of intersectional experiences of discrimination for Asian American women. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 9(1): 32–46
Naidoo, M. 2019. Racism, whiteness and transformation: reforming the space of theological education in South Africa. International Academy of Practical Theology.
Conference Series, 1: 168-175.
Newman, M. L., Pennebaker, J. W., Berry, D. S., & Richards, J. M. 2003. Lying words: Predicting deception from linguistic styles. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 29(5): 665-675.
Ng, E. S., & Sears, G. J. 2017. The glass ceiling in context: the influence of CEO gender, recruitment practices and firm internationalisation on the representation of women in management. Human Resource Management Journal, 27(1): 133-151.
Owen, J. M., & Lambert, F. C. 1995. Roles for evaluation in learning organizations. Evaluation, 1(2): 237-250.
Pennebaker, J.W., Booth, R.J., Boyd, R.L., & Francis, M.E.2015. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC2015. Austin, TX: Pennebaker Conglomerates.
Ponthieux, S., & Meurs, D. 2015. Gender inequality. In A. B. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon (Eds.), Handbook of Income Distribution, vol.2a: 981-1146. Elsevier.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-59428-0.00013-8
Rafaeli, A., & Harness, A. 2002. Validation of self-presentation: Theory and findings from letters of application for employment. Advances in Qualitative Organization Research, 4(1): 1-37.
Remedios, J. D., & Snyder, S. H. 2015. Where Do We Go From Here? Toward an Inclusive and Intersectional Literature of Multiple Stigmatization. Sex Roles, 73(9–10): 408– 413. doi:10.1007/s11199-015-0543-4
Revilla, A.T., & Smooth, W. 2014. Introduction: Women of Color and Gender Equity. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 35(3): Vii-X. doi:10.5250/
fronjwomestud.35.3.0vii
Roberson, Q. M. 2019. Diversity in the workplace: A review, synthesis, and future research agenda. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational
Behavior, 6: 69-88.
Robinson, M. D., Boyd, R. L., & Fetterman, A. K. 2014. An emotional signature of political ideology: Evidence from two linguistic content-coding studies. Personality and
Individual Differences, 71, 98-102.
Rose-Redwood, R. A., & Azaryahu, M. 2017. The urban streetscape as political cosmos.
Routledge.
Rosette, A. S., Koval, C. Z., Ma, A., & Livingston, R. 2016. Race matters for women leaders: Intersectional effects on agentic deficiencies and penalties. The Quarterly, 27(3): 429-445.
Rudman, L.A. 1998.Self-promotion as a risk factor for women: The costs and benefits of counter stereotypical impression management. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 629–645.
Shields, S.A.2008. Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective. Sex Roles, 59(5-6):301-311. Schein, V. E. 2001. A global look at psychological barriers to women’s progress in
management. Journal of Social Issues, 57: 675–688.
Schein, V. E., Mueller, R., Lituchy, T., & Liu, J. 1996. Think manager—think male: A global phenomenon? Journal of Organizational Behavior, 17: 33.
Scheuer, C. L., & Loughlin, C. 2020. Could the aging workforce reduce the agency penalty for female leaders? Re-examining the think manager–think male stereotype. Journal of Management & Organization, 26(1): 29-51.
Schmiedel, T., Müller, O., & vom Brocke, J. 2018. Topic Modeling as a Strategy of Inquiry in Organizational Research: A Tutorial With an Application Example on Organizational Culture. Organizational Research Methods, 22(4): 941–
968. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428118773858
Seglow, J. 2003. Multiculturalism. In Bellamy R. & Mason A. (Eds.), Political concepts:156-168. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press. Accessed online
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jbcx.17. Viewed February 26, 2020.
Singh, V., & Point, S. 2006. (Re)Presentations of Gender and Ethnicity in Diversity Statements on European Company Websites. Journal of Business Ethics, 68:363-379.
Tajfel, H. 1982. Social Identity and intergroup relations. Cambridge: University Press. Talent naar de Top. 2019a. Over Talent naar de top. Accessed online
https://www.talentnaardetop.nl/over-talent-naar-de-top. Viewed November, 29 2019. Talent naar de Top. 2019b. Onze missie. Accessed online
Talent naar de Top. 2019c. Onze community. Accessed online
https://talentnaardetop.nl/onze-community-logos. Viewed November, 29 2019. The Robert Schuman Foundation. 2019. Gender Equality in Europe: what is progress in
2019? Retrieved from: https://www.robert-schuman.eu/en/european-issues/0505- gender-equality-in-europe-what-progress-in-2019. Viewed December, 13 2019. Trafimow, D., Wang, T., Wang, C., & Myuz, H. A. 2019. Does Slight Skewness Matter?.
International Journal of Aviation Research, 11(1): 11-24.
Wagner, J. 1995. Exports, firm size, and firm dynamics. Small Business Economics, 7(1): 29-39.
Wang, J. 2009. Networking in the workplace: Implications for women's career development. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2009(122):33-42.
Ward, J. 2008. White normativity: The cultural dimensions of Whiteness in a racially diverse LGBT organization. Sociological Perspectives, 51(3): 563-586. Wolff, H. G., Schneider-Rahm, C. I., & Forret, M. L. 2011. Adaptation of a German
multidimensional networking scale into English. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 27(4): 244-250.
Wong, C.Y. 2018. More Than Just Women- Research Proposal. Unpublished manuscript, Human Resource and Organizational Behavior, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
Wong, C.Y., Kirby,T., Ryan, M. & Rink, F.A. 2019. Intersectional Differences in
Reactions to Women's Initiatives. Unpublished manuscript, Human Resource and Organizational Behavior, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. Zinn, M., & Dill, B. 1996. Theorizing difference from multiracial feminism. Feminist
APPENDIX
Table 2
Substantiation of the Codebook
5
The exploratory categories that were excluded (see footnote 1) in this research as they gained less results, are also depicted in this table
Role Category Definition Key words Coding based on
Hypothesis testing
Agency Agency orients people to the self, one’s abilities and relates to assertiveness, ambition and leading (Eagly et al., 2019). Ambitious, assertiveness, competitiveness, ability to make decisions, confidence etc. 1. Eagly, Nater, Miller, Kaufmann & Sczesny (2019) 2. Wong, Kirby,
Ryan & Rink (2019) 3. Schmiedel,
Müller & vom Brocke (2018) Multiculturalism Multiculturalism refers to the recognition and attention to the existence of people from different racial and ethnic
backgrounds (Dewing & Leman, 2006). background, culture, minority, skin color, nationality, race, ethnicity, etc. 1. Dewing & Leman (2006) 2. Wong, Kirby,
Ryan & Rink (2019) 3. Seglow (2003) Exploratory categories5 Excesses of Agency Scoring low on Agency, refers to the perception that women are not agentic enough (Eagly & Karau, 2002).
Muted, shy, hesitant, soft, etc.
1. Eagly & Karau (2002)
2. Wong, Kirby, Ryan & Rink (2019)
Scoring high on Agency refers to the perception of women behaving in a highly agentic manner (Eagly & Karau, 2002).
Aggressive, dominant, pushy, threatening
1. Eagly & Karau (2002) 2. Eagly, Nater, Miller, Kaufmann & Sczesny (2019) 3. Rosette, Koval & Livingston (2016) 4. Wong, Kirby,
Ryan & Rink (2019) Communion Communion directs
Ryan & Rink (2019) Competence Competence refers
to the ability to invent or develop new things (Eagly et al, 2019). Creative, innovative, intelligent, smart, organized, etc. 1. Eagly, Nater, Miller, Kaufmann & Sczesny (2019) 2. Schmiedel,
Müller & vom Brocke (2018) 3. Fiske, Cuddy,
Glick & Xu (2002) 4. Wong, Kirby,
Ryan & Rink (2019) Distributive Fairness Distributive fairness refers to the allocation of rewards and responsibilities according accepted allocation norms (Long, 2016). Deserve, equal, fairness, transparency, etc. 1. Auspurg, Hinz & Sauer (2017) 2. Lips (2016) 3. Long (2016) 4. Revilla & Smooth (2014) 5. Wong, Kirby,
Ryan & Rink (2019) Networking Networking refers
to building and maintaining
personal contacts to gain resources that, consecutively, enhance an individual’s career success and working performance (Wolff, Schneider-Rahm & Forret, 2011). community, guidance, network, support, etc. 1. Baltodano, Carlson, Jackson & Mitchell (2012) 2. Helms & Cook
(1999) 3. Landrine (1995) 4. Jean-Marie & Brooks (2011) 5. Quinlan (1999) 6. Wolff, Schneider-Rahm & Forret (2011)
7. Wong, Kirby, Ryan & Rink (2019) Stereotypes
Awareness
Stereotypes refer to one’s believe and cognitions that characterize people based solely on their group membership (Fiske, 1993). bias, ethnicity, perception, prejudice, etc.
1. Eagly & Wood, (2016) 2. Fiske (1993) 3. Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu (2002) 4. Wong, Kirby,
