Building blocks of bias: Gender composition predicts male and female group members’ evaluations of each other and the group

Abstract

The present research examined how a group's gender composition influences intragroup evaluations. Group members evaluated fellow group members and the group as a whole following a shared task. As predicted, no performance differences were found as a function of gender composition, but judgments of individuals’ task contributions, the group's effectiveness, and desire to work with one's group again measured at a 10-week follow-up were increasingly negative as the proportion of women in the group increased. Negative judgments were consistently directed at male and female group members as indicated by no gender of target effects, demonstrating that men, simply by working alongside women, can be detrimentally affected by negative stereotypes about women. Implications for gender diversity in the workplace are discussed.

Introduction

Research consistently indicates that gender affects judgments in work settings. Perceptions of women's incompetence and negative evaluations of their performance arise from the belief that women are deficient in the male stereotyped agentic attributes (e.g., ambitious, competitive) that are required for success in male sex-typed roles (Eagly and Karau, 2002, Heilman, 2001, Rudman et al., 2012). This negative effect of gender stereotypes can persist even in the presence of disconfirming behavioral evidence (Foschi, 1996). Judgments of work groups also are affected by gender such that gender-diverse task groups are perceived as less effective than are task groups with more men (Baugh & Graen, 1997). The study reported here addresses how gender composition of task groups affects intragroup processes; namely, members’ evaluations of male and female group members and the group as a whole. Unlike past research, our focus is not on third party evaluations of group members, but rather on group members’ evaluations of each other.

It would not be surprising if the performance of female group members was negatively evaluated within work groups composed of more women than men, particularly on male gender-typed tasks for which there is a lack of fit between the attributes women are thought to embody and the attributes believed to be required for success. However, we propose that a group composed of more women than men can also negatively affect how male group members are evaluated. Two different streams of research lead us to this prediction.

For one, when completing a male-typed task for which gender stereotypes are relevant, it is possible that in female‐dominated groups, stereotypes about women's deficiencies in agentic attributes “leak” into evaluations of men when those men are working interdependently with women, thereby detrimentally affecting views of their competence and performance effectiveness. This idea is consistent with research demonstrating that when there is a high degree of entitativity between stigmatized and non-stigmatized persons (e.g., shared outcomes and common goals), a “stigma-by-association” effect occurs whereby non-stigmatized persons are ascribed stereotypical traits of the stigmatized persons (Pryor, Reeder, & Monroe, 2012). It is also consistent with the finding that men are perceived to be deficient in agentic attributes when working in female‐dominated occupations and job contexts (Heilman & Wallen, 2010).

Alternatively, the proportion of stereotyped individuals in a group (in this case women) might be an emergent property of the group itself, which may color the perceptions and experiences of its members. As the number of women in a group increases, the views of the group as a whole may change in a way that is consistent with negative stereotypes about women in the workplace, and filter down to perceptions of group members—whether male or female. This idea is consistent with prior work demonstrating that group-level category memberships can shape individual group members’ judgments of the group as a whole and each other, above and beyond those individuals’ own category memberships (Gaertner and Dovidio, 2000, Hewstone and Brown, 1986). However, whereas that research has historically been concerned with examining the evaluative benefits of positively valued group-level category membership on perceptions of outgroup members (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000), the current research is focused on the potential evaluative costs of negatively valued group-level category membership on perceptions of outgroup members; in this case men in a predominantly female group.

With these ideas as a backdrop, we propose that the greater the number of female members in a group working on a male gender-typed task, the more the group members will make negative judgments about each others’ performance, and these negative judgments will be directed not only at female group members but also at male group members. Our objective is to extend prior work on the effects of gender stereotypes to the workgroup level, potentially demonstrating an unrecognized consequence of gender diversity within task-focused settings—that even group members who are positively stereotyped can be detrimentally affected when affiliated with a negatively stereotyped group.