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Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is crucial for organizations, yet these efforts can inadvertently lead to negative consequences for women and racial minorities. This symposium aims to delve into the underlying mechanisms of these unintended outcomes and highlight effective solutions. By inviting leading scholars in this domain to share ongoing research, this platform seeks to dissect the complexities of DEI implementation, paving the way for more nuanced strategies. It also aims to identify proactive measures to minimize negative impacts and amplify positive outcomes. With a forward-looking approach, this symposium endeavors to shape the future trajectory of DEI research and practice, offering valuable insights for fostering inclusive and equitable organizational environments. Gender differences in perceptions of meritocracy Author: Shoshana Schwartz; Christopher Newport U. Author: Isabel Fernandez-Mateo; London Business School Author: Herminia Ibarra; London Business School Author: Dana Kanze; London Business School Parental Leaves and Men's Communality Advantage at Work Author: Anja Krstic; York U., Toronto Caught Between Female Tokenism And Female Dominance Author: Anthea (Yan) Zhang; Rice U. The Gendering of Job Application Sources: Analyzing Hiring Outcomes across Job Titles, Organizations Author: Emilio J. Castilla; MIT Sloan School of Management Author: Francesco Sguera; UCP - Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas feminine stereotypes center on communal characteristics such as helpfulness and cooperativeness, male stereotypes center on agentic characteristics including competence and assertiveness (Abele, 2003; Fiske & Stevens, 1993). Broad beliefs and specific stereotypes about gender do more than just describe common gender differences in behavior, they also prescribe how men and women ought to behave (Gorman, 2005; Heilman, 1983; Perry, Davis-Blake, & Kulik, 1994). Such prescriptions may lead to gender inequality by shaping expectations in two distinct ways. First, evaluators assessing both men and women are apt to interpret behaviors demonstrated by male and female candidates based on the consistency of these behaviors vis-à-vis dominant gendered beliefs (e.g., Correll, Weisshaar, Wynn, & Wehner, 2020). Second, gendered beliefs shape people's understanding about how others expect them to behave, thus, at times, leading individuals to conform to what they see as the desired, or expected, behaviors based on their gender (e.g., Correll et al., 2017). The aim of this symposium is to deepen and expand our understanding of how such gendered beliefs and expectations both shape the how men and women are evaluated by others and lead men and women to engage differently, specifically in ways that often disadvantage women. This symposium brings together economic sociologists, strategic management scholars, and organizational behavior scholars using a wide range of methods (e.g., observational, natural language processing, experimental) to uncover the processes leading to gender inequalities in the workplace. In line with the annual meeting theme, Putting the Worker Front and Center, each of the papers in this symposium focuses on worker behavior and the ways these behaviors can lead to gender differences in outcomes. Furthermore, the papers in this symposium examine these gender dynamics both at the hiring interface and over time among existing employees within organizations, thus offering insights about worker experiences with inequality at numerous critical moments for organizations seeking to create equitable workplaces. Differential Effects of Transparency: How Transparency Shapes Male and Female Evaluative Behavior Author: Mabel Abraham; Columbia Business School Author: Brittany Bond; Cornell U. Catching Negativity: Gender and the Dynamics of Emotional Contagion in Email Author: Sanaz Mobasseri; Boston U. Questrom School of Business Gender Differences in Career Advancement When Re-entering the Workforce After Entrepreneurship Author: Tristan L. Botelho; Yale School of Management Author: Daniel Fehder; USC Marshall School of Business Author: Milan Miric; U. of Southern California -Marshall School of Business The Intersectional Implications of the Gender Composition of Applicant Pools Author: Claire Daviss; Stanford U. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee performance appraisals are widely used in current organizations, influencing major career-related decisions made about employees, including salary increases, promotions, and terminations. The present study examines the determinants of performance evaluation of employees in one large service organization in the United States. More specifically, I empirically identify and test the main mechanisms behind employee subjective performance evaluations at the workplace. I find evidence that supervisors' past work connections among each other impact their future subjective evaluation of employees, above and beyond what has been shown in the literature. I structure my argument as follows. First, I start by testing several individualistic perspectives accounting for bias in the performance evaluation of employees. Thus, I examine the impact of the demographics of the individuals being rated and the ones doing the rating. Beyond this "demographic effects" perspective, I examine the importance of the ratee-rater similarity on performance ratings. I also evaluate the organizational and relational demography theses as potential sources of performance bias. The basic argument here is that the demographic composition of particular work units or establishments affects employee performance ratings. Finally, since these previous theoretical perspectives primarily emphasize how supervisors evaluate employees on their own, I test a basic network mechanism affecting the way supervisors evaluate their subordinates: My approach assumes that supervisors are embedded in social networks of employees and other supervisors and that these personal connections among supervisors in turn shape their impressions and subsequent performance evaluations of workers within organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has examined the link between ascriptive characteristics (e.g., gender and/or race) and important employee career outcomes such as wage growth, promotions, and terminations. There is also a large lab- and field-based literature on the topic of performance evaluation bias. However, all these studies presume that today's organizations are meritocratic, and consequently that a significant positive relationship between performance, wage, and wage growth is institutionally valued and strongly supported. If performance evaluation works the way advocates of meritocracy claim, then including performance ratings in any empirical models should explain away the effect of any ascriptive characteristics on wage growth. In this article, I examine whether evidence supports the meritocratic claim in a special setting with unique data. In this setting, supervisors evaluate employees using dyadic performance evaluations, and these evaluations constitute the primary source of salary increases over time. Although there is no evidence that gender, race, or nationality accounts for any differences in starting annual salaries within a given occupation in a given work unit, I still find that certain organizational decisions produce important wage inequality outcomes over employees' tenures: Observationally equivalent women and men, for example, obtain unequal salary increases over time, even after they are given the same performance evaluation. These findings are robust after controlling for the process of turnover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on what determines organizational performance (more specifically start-up firm performance) is characterized by a debate between economics and sociology. The extreme economic view proposes that in the long run, a rational market takes care of allocating scarce resources such as venture capital funding to the most potentially profitable and exciting business plans. By contrast, the sociological view highlights how entrepreneurial efforts and economic activities are more successful when embedded in a densely connected network of social actors. My research adds to the study of new organizations? performance by examining both economic and sociological factors influencing the success and financial performance of venture capital funded start-up companies in the United States between 1995 and 1998. (It also uses IPO data until 2002.) In my preliminary analysis of data on venture capital funding, firm location, stage and industry, and performance, I find evidence that after controlling for the most important economic factors, network variables still play an important role in explaining firms? success. Start-up companies backed by venture capital firms involved in more dense patterns of co-investments are more likely to go public than start-ups funded by isolated venture capital firms. In addition, the success of a start-up company in the public market seems to be significantly enhanced when its funding comes from a group of highly experienced venture capital firms. This study suggests that an approach that explores the network structure among a region?s important actors can satisfactorily account for performance advantages among firms and ultimately among regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]