Gender roles in the workplace pdf

We conjecture that people with high cognitive reflection test scores would exhibit a lower attitude to evaluate jobs in monetary terms using automatic stereotypes. Hence, high ability people should discriminate less then the others.

Our main result is that males with higher CRT scores do not assign lower wages to females supporting our hypothesis that high CRT subjects are less inclined to gender discrimination than the others. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section we illustrate the survey design, provide a motivation for our choice of the questions included in the questionnaire and describe the rewarding scheme for participants.

Section 3 is dedicated to the regression analysis of the collected data. Some concluding remarks are left to the last section. Survey design The survey has been carried out during the Spring semester in a medium sized italian university in Northern Italy. The survey has been administered to first-year students enrolled in the Economics and Business Administration Departments at the end of a lecture in the second half of the semester. Students did not know that a survey would have taken place beforehand, once in class we just asked for their co-operation in a research project and they were told nothing about the topic of the survey.

Six different questionnaires have been randomly handed out in class. Following Alksnis et al. At the beginning of the questionnaire a short description of the job is given. The description contains the duties and role of the person occupying that job and it is the same irrespective of whether the job is allocated in the traditional masculine or female sector.

In particular, we have: 1. Using a 7-point scale ranging from 1 low to 7 high , students are asked to evaluate different facets of each dimension. As for the skills and abilities required for the job we consider physical vs. Overall, considering 9 items on four dimensions we expect to be able to cover in sufficient detail the specificity of the productive characteristics of each job.

Next, we ask students to state a plausible monthly wage for the person occupying the job. Given that students may not be very familiar with actual wages in the labor market, we provided six wage brackets from low to high wages and asked students to choose the most appropriate one1.

Given that the questionnaire is, so far, neutral with respect to gender, it is likely that students had built their own mental representation of the worker identifying implicitly the underlying gender of the worker.

The stated wage should therefore reflect the hypothesized gender of the imaginary worker and, whenever gender stereotypes are present, we should observe different salaries attributed to identical jobs when located in different sectors. The second section of the questionnaire is divided in two parts. In the first one, in a set of questions we try to characterize the respondents asking their age, gender, working experience, educational background and working status of their parents and number of sisters or brothers.

Students are then asked to choose the age and gender of the imaginary worker. No particular emphasis is given to the specific question on the gender of the worker. Clearly, this question and This timing of the question after the wage has been declared is crucial for the survey and for the general idea of eliciting gender stereotypes. If gender stereotyping is present among students then they will imagine women men to perform the jobs allocated in the typically female sectors.

If gender stereotypes also imply different wages, then students will assign lower wages to women then to men. If students imagined that women men were performing the jobs allocated in the female male sectors and assign lower wages to them, this should be reflected in different salaries assigned to the same jobs but allocated in different sectors. These questions have been first proposed by Frederick in a more in-depth study on the relation between the cognitive reflection ability and several items related to decision making such as impatience and risk preferences.

The three questions are taken from Frederick : 1. A bat and a ball cost 1. The bat costs 1 euro more than the ball. How much does the ball costs? If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take machines to make widgets?

In a lake, there is a patchog lily pads. Every day, the patch double in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

We also use this section of the questionnaire to provide students with an incentive to answer correctly. Before the questionnaires were handed out, students were told that one of them could win a monetary prize 10 euros by carefully filling in the questionnaire.

We did not make any specific mention to a particular section of the questionnaire. After all the students had handed in the questionnaires, one student was chosen from the audience to randomly draw one of the questionnaires. If the randomly drawn questionnaire had correct answers to all three cognitive ability questions, then the associated student would get the prize.

If not, a second questionnaire would have been drawn, the answer checked and the prize awarded if they were correct. The process continued until a questionnaire with correct answers was drawn. Empirical results We start our analysis with some descriptive statistics. Hence, gender stereotypes are pervasive among men and women. Disaggregated results can be found in Table 1, where the accordance with the sug- gested stereotype is clear for both male and female students with one exception, the editor of specialized magazines.

In fact, male female students are more likely to think that the editor of an automobile food magazine is a male female than female male students are likely to think of. The dissimilarity index is equal to 0 when both gender are equally represented in every job and it is equal to if each job is allocated exclusively to stereotyped sectors.

In our data, the dissimilarity index D is equal to The high value of the sex segregation index indicates that respondents are truly using stereotypes when assigning the gender to the jobholder and that our strategy of asking the salary before asking the sex of the worker may be able to elicit the implied wage gap due to stereoptypes.

Some descriptive statistics are reported in Table 2. For instance, if we consider the item simple vs. Also, if we consider the item related to specific vs. Thus, students seem to be able to evaluate the distinctive feature of the jobs and to rank them. Apart from one exception, given by the evaluation made by female students of the hardware clerk where the t-statistics is equal to Thus, we may conclude that, in our sample, no significant differences arises in the subjective evaluation of objective characteristics.

In our sample no significant differences arise in the subjective evaluation of objective characteristics. Table 4 provides evidence that female students tend to assign to the hypothetical worker described in the questionnaire lower wages than males. The mean wage assigned to males by men and women is given by The mean wages assigned by female students to men and women are given by They same pattern of results obtain if we use the target or dominant gender in the occupation in place of the assigned gender, as there is strong correlation between dominant gender and assigned gender due to stereotyping.

On the whole, our findings are fully coherent with those obtained by Frederick Since males and females may be subject to a different degree of gender stereotypes, we run separate regressions for the two subgroups participants. Given that students are asked to assign a wage in predetermined wage brackets, our dependent variable is interval-coded.

Given the nature of the data, we estimate the model by the interval regression estimation method, which is an ordered probit model with fixed not estimated cut points Wooldridge, We transform these ordinal qualitative regressors following the approach suggested by Terza Table 6 contain regression results using heteroskedasticity robust standard errors.

Odd numbered columns refer to the male subgroup while even numbered columns refer to the female one. In each estimated model we include among the regressors the dummy Gender, which is equal to 1 if the job is assigned to a female and zero otherwise.

In column 1 and 2 we estimate the base model. The estimated coefficient of the Gender dummy variable in the male subgroup is negative and highly significant while it is not statistically different from zero in the female subgroup. Thus, even though both males and females are subject to gender stereotypes when assigning gender to jobs, only men value less jobs typically performed by women. Does cognitive ability play a role in our results? To isolate the effect of a high cognitive reflection ability, we define a dummy variable, say CRT , equal to 1 for those who gave 3 out of 3 correct answers and look for differences in the monetary evaluation of jobs between this group of students with higher cognitive reflection ability and the others.

Thus, low ability men as well as high ability men are affected by gender stereotypes. No effect is found for the female subgroup. These results suggest that male individuals with higher cognitive reflection score, thus more likely to resist the inclination to report the answer that first comes to mind, are subject to gender stereotyping as much as low ability men while women are not affected by stereotyping, regardless of the cognitive reflection ability.

The fieldwork that was performed through direct observation gave an insight into the way in which an office created, maintained, and generally worked with the specific roles that had been given to certain members during a business meeting. The gender roles that had been identified and given to the office workers from the fieldwork show that the office is male dominated and that the female employees must act in a way that is submissive and passive to their male coworkers who have been labeled as authoritative figures to the females of the office.

This is typical in traditional gender socialization and cultural settings. The location was the Sikorsky Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the research was gathered on February 19th. The information was not gathered by interviews or surveys and was limited to direct observations from the interactions of the employees by the researcher.

Based upon the observations collected from the interactions of the employees and the general investigation of the cubicles, general conclusions were drawn about the role of gender within this office setting.

It is evident based upon the findings of the research that this particular office has very defined gender roles within it an example of gender discrimination. From the observations of the conference room, it can be concluded that the males hold the positions of authority and power within the office.

This is a common practice within household relationships and it appeared that the female employees of this office were taking that same role with their colleagues. In addition to the females taking a more nurturing and supportive role, it would appear that they give the real authority in their office to the men. This became evident in the ways in which the males compared to the females would point out mistakes that were made by the individuals that made points or presented ideas during the meeting.

From studies that have been performed over the last 20 years, it is consistently found that women have less authority than males in the workplace, and this office clearly backed this sort of evidence Smith. There were direct examples of the male authority that went beyond the manner in which the females and males chose how to interact verbally present at the office. The women were put into some positions that were classic examples of tokenism within the workplace.

In the case of this office, the male that was running the business meeting had a woman run the computer during his presentation even though she was not his assistant. In this scenario, the woman played a specific role as the subservient gender that helped the male leader fill his role of running the meeting, showing that this female employee fit the role of a token in the workplace as an assistant to the male authority figure.

This also raises questions about the role of female leaders in the workplace , specifically since this office space showed that females are clearly not seen as leaders or authority figures. This was shown further to be the case in terms of which employees were given company phones. Only one female worker had a company phone whereas all of the males had one.

This was an indicator that even though the employees were all on the same level of authority based upon their job titles, the men were valued as more of the leaders and authoritative figures and were given company phones to make contact with the clients of the business based on the idea that women are generally penalized for being assertive and becoming leaders in the workplace based on the gender status that has been assigned to them Ridgeway.

One of the other major factors that showed the difference in gender in the office employees was the way in which the male and female workers appeared both in a physical sense and the way in which they shaped their personal workspaces within their cubicles. In terms of how the different gender employees dressed and presented themselves, it was apparent that two different motives went into their choices of wardrobe. Whereas the men choice clothing that were business appropriate, their major emphasis was clearly based on comfort and practicality of the articles of clothing.

They would choose to wear button-ups or polos with slacks that were professional but clearly relatively comfortable and overwhelmingly chose a functional pair of dress shoes that were entirely based on functionality. This is completely different from the motives to the way the female employees dressed. They would wear clothes that were based on being presentable over functional and comfort such as high heels, jewelry, or tight fitting clothing. This also is present in the way in which the cubicles of the employees are maintained.

From the observations gathered, it is worth noting that there exist several important limiting factors. First and foremost, the sample size of this particular office is so small that no definite trends that are taken from it can apply to the workplace at large. The number of employees here cannot accurately portray the entire workplace or serve as an example for workplaces in general because of its size. This research and observations made were entirely based upon this particular office and the role that gender played within it.

Second, the employees themselves were not asked how they felt the roles of gender were present in the office. The observations generated and collected were made independently from the point of view of the employees as they were gathered from an outside party that merely watched the interactions.

Related to this, as an observer was present to record the office happenings, the interactions of the employees could have been altered as they were trying to appear the most professional as possible in order to impress the observer and not make themselves appear to be seen in a negative light. Based on the observations, it is clear that gender roles play a large factor in the office that was observed. It is clear that the females, when compared to the males in the office, take a much more subservient role and let the male employees have the authority and power in the office.

The classic gender roles that have been embedded into society have clearly permeated and held true in the workplace between genders namely in terms of assigning roles of leadership and authority. Though the female stereotype is evolving and undergoing a dramatic reevaluation process, it is clear that in some place, such as the office that was observed from the field work, that there are certain places in the business world that have not yet realized the new roles that women clearly are capable and should be allowed to take.

From these factors, it is evident that in the observed office that gender roles have been clearly associated between the male and female employees. Eagly, Alice, and Steven Karau. Lindsey, L. Ridgeway, Cecilia. Smith, Ryan. Whisner, Mary. Zimmer, Lynn. This blog post is provided free of charge and we encourage you to use it for your research and writing.

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