“Why Can’t I Become a Manager?”—A Systematic Review of Gender Stereotypes and Organizational Discrimination

Ana M. Castaño, Yolanda Fontanil and Antonio L. García-Izquierdo
Additional contact information
Ana M. Castaño: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain
Yolanda Fontanil: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain
Antonio L. García-Izquierdo: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 10, 1-29

Abstract: Women continue to lag behind for accessing managerial positions, partially due to discrimination at work. One of the main roots of such discrimination is gender stereotyping, so we aim to comprehend those biased procedures. First, we have analyzed those highlighted gender lawsuit cases in the scientific literature that have dealt with stereotypes both in the American and the European work contexts. Second, meta-analytic studies regarding organizational consequences of gender stereotypes have been synthetized. Third, gender stereotypes have been grouped by means of a content analysis of the existing literature after processing 61 articles systematically retrieved from WOS, SCOPUS, and PsycINFO databases. As a result, a taxonomy of gender stereotypes has been achieved evidencing that descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes have an impact on decision-making procedures through the apparently perception of women as less suitable for managerial positions. Moreover, we offer a deep explanation of the gender discrimination phenomenon under the umbrella of psychosocial theories, and some measures for successfully overcoming management stereotyping, showing that organizational culture can be improved from both the perspective of equal employment opportunities and the organizational justice frameworks for reaching a balanced and healthier workplace.

Keywords: gender discrimination; stereotypes; managerial positions; organizational justice; systematic review; decent work; equal employment opportunities; healthy organizations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1813/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/10/1813/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:10:p:1813-:d:233256

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().