Engendering Inequity? How Social Accounts Create vs. Merely Explain Unfavorable Pay Outcomes for Women

Maura A. Belliveau ()
Additional contact information
Maura A. Belliveau: Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322

Organization Science, 2012, vol. 23, issue 4, 1154-1174

Abstract: Two studies examined how managers' pay decisions for male and female employees are affected by the opportunity to provide social accounts and how managers think about the value of accounts for men versus women. I theorized that managers would treat social accounts as substitutes for pay for women but not for men, paradoxically leading managers who could behave more procedurally fairly to create gender-based distributive injustice. Study 1 confirms this hypothesis. Practicing managers who learned before making pay decisions that they could provide a social account—here, an explanation of circumstances justifying low raises—paid women less than men and less than women for whom they could not provide this account. Also as hypothesized, when an account was available, experienced managers paid women less than did inexperienced managers. In addition to pay decisions, participants' explicit beliefs about the value of accounts as substitutes for pay (Study 1) and in motivating male and female employees (Study 2) were examined. When participants expected the account to make the employee feel that he or she had been treated with a high level of procedural fairness (Study 1), or the language of the account explicitly acknowledged and apologized for unfair treatment (Study 2), participants assumed that the account would be significantly more valuable for women than for men. This difference was greater for experienced participants than inexperienced ones. I discuss the implications of this “substitutability thesis” and these results for research on justice and gender as well as for achieving gender equity in the workplace.

Keywords: gender; inequality; procedural justice; distributive justice; social accounts; gender wage gap; prejudice; sexism; experience; gender stereotypes; compensation; managerial decision making; discrimination; careers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1110.0691 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ororsc:v:23:y:2012:i:4:p:1154-1174

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().