A Hidden Barrier to Diversification? Performance Recognition Penalties for Incumbent Workers in Male-Dominated Occupations

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Jennifer Merluzzi

George Washington University, USA

Bernard Ramanantsoa room

Responding to persistent gender inequity, organizations have adopted diversity initiatives to
promote women’s representation in traditionally male-dominated occupations. Although studies
have identified challenges to these initiatives for women entering, we uncover a performance
recognition penalty for incumbent workers originating from the process of occupational
diversification. As women incrementally enter a male-dominated occupation, a conflict arises
between the changing gender composition at the work unit level and the masculine “ideal worker”
prototype embedded in the occupation. We propose that this conflict will lower the performance
expectations of the work unit, decreasing the individual likelihood of performance recognition for
each worker in the unit. Using detailed panel data on police officers, we observed that an officer’s
individual likelihood of being nominated for a performance award consistently declined when his
or her work unit proportionately increased in women officers. Both men and women managers
enacted this penalty, with men managers penalizing men subordinates more than women
subordinates. This pattern remained for awards recognizing exceptional performance, regardless
of gender-typing of the unit or its work tasks, and considering officer tenure and attrition from the
unit. Our findings offer novel insights into the challenge of diversifying male-dominated
occupations.

The authors thank Stephanie Chen for her research assistance. This paper benefited from
comments on earlier versions by Ming Leung, Ben Rissing, Adina Sterling, and seminar
participants at the AOM conference, Wharton People and Organizations, Cornell ILR, the
University of Hong Kong, and UIUC.

Keywords: Gender, Diversity, Male-dominated occupations, Performance recognition, Women’s
representation; Law Enforcement and Policing