Women are less likely to be promoted because of gender bias in the workforce, according to a UF professor’s findings.
Joyce Bono, a UF management professor, conducted four studies over the past eight years that suggest different standards are used to evaluate the same behavior between men and women.
“One thing that is very clear is that this is not someone being (biased) and saying I don’t want women in top leadership,” she said.
More than half of first-time managers are women, she said, and more than half of business degrees at the undergraduate level are earned by women. But Bono said her research showed that women have to perform at a higher standard than men to be promoted.
The studies aimed to make sense of gender gaps in the upper ranks of organizations by looking at gender bias in bosses’ evaluations of managers’ derailment potential, she said. Derailment is the idea that an employee who was thought to be high-potential doesn’t achieve expectation.
If a woman and a man exhibit the same ineffective interpersonal skills, a boss would be more hesitant to promote the woman because the boss has been conditioned to believe women should be nicer, Bono said.
When Bono and her team looked at formal performance evaluations of managers, there was no bias. But when bosses were asked about the derailment potential of a manager in the future, a gender bias emerged.
Elisabeth Gilbert, 28, a co-author of the study, said they found that female managers are seen as more likely to fail and as having less potential to succeed.
“They are small effects, but they matter a lot if you’re the woman in the situation,” the UF business administration doctoral student said. “They matter a lot if we think about big organizations.”
Bono said the best way to fix the gender bias is to talk about it.
“So I think the main thing is to have continued conversation at all levels,” she said, “from undergraduate students to CEOs of companies.”
