Up to no good? Gender, social impact work and employee promotions
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Published version
Author(s)
Bode, Christiane
Rogan, Michelle
Singh, Jasjit
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Firms increasingly offer employees the opportunity to participate in firm-sponsored social impact initiatives expected to benefit the firm and employees. We argue that participation in such initiatives hinders employees’ advancement in their firms by reducing others’ perceptions of their fit and commitment. Because social impact work is more congruent with female gender role stereotypes, promotion rates will be lower for participating men, and male evaluators will be less likely than female evaluators to recommend promotion for male participants. Using panel data on 1,379 employees of a consulting firm, we find significantly lower promotion rates for male participants relative to female participants, female non-participants, and male non-participants. A vignette experiment involving 893 managers shows that lower promotion rates are due to lower perceptions of fit, but not commitment, and greater bias against male participants by male evaluators. Taken together, the results of the two studies suggest that the negative effect of participation on promotion is conditional upon participant and evaluator gender, underscoring the role of gender in evaluation of social impact work. In settings in which decision makers are predominately male, gender beliefs may limit male employees’ latitude to contribute to the firm’s social impact agenda.
Date Issued
2022-03-01
Date Acceptance
2021-04-22
Citation
Administrative Science Quarterly, 2022, 67 (1), pp.82-130
ISSN
0001-8392
Publisher
The Johnson School
Start Page
82
End Page
130
Journal / Book Title
Administrative Science Quarterly
Volume
67
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
License URL
Identifier
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00018392211020660
Subjects
Social Sciences
Business
Management
Business & Economics
corporate social responsibility
gender
human capital
promotions
social evaluation
careers
CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY
STATUS INCONGRUITY
SEX SEGREGATION
BACKLASH
FEMALE
WOMEN
MEN
RESPONSIBILITY
PERFORMANCE
ORGANIZATIONS
Business & Management
1503 Business and Management
1505 Marketing
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-06-04