Date Posted: 3/14/2017 11:08:03 AM
Posted By: 4520 Membership Level: Gold Total Points: 5251
Women's Access to Power and the Gender Earnings Gaps" which has been authored by Anja-Kristin Abendroth, Silvia Melzer, Alexandra Kalev and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey. The article was published in ILR review journal and published in the year 2017. The research main investigates the authors explore whether and how women's access to higher level positions, firms' human resources practices, and workers' qualification levels are associated with gender differences in earnings. First, they find that having more women in management reduces the gender earnings gap for jobs with low qualifications, but not those with high qualifications. Second, they find that while men's compensation is positively affected by having a male supervisor, women with a female supervisor do not receive such an advantage. Finally, they find that human resources practices and job-level qualifications moderate the association between gendered power and gender earnings inequalities. Integrating women into managerial and supervisory roles does not automatically reduce gender inequalities; its impacts are contingent on organizational context. In other words, the authors aim at how to increase women's Representation in powerful positions in many organizations and at the same time investigate what happens to gender inequality when women do obtain powerful positions.The Literature review used helps the research in contributing to existing research on women in power and gender inequality in several ways. The research looks at supervisor-worker dyads in previous research which have shown that smaller gender inequalities in work places where the share of women in the management is high. Such research includes one done by Cohen et al. IN 1998, Kurtulus and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012 and Hirsch 2013. It is known how much less about how the gender composition of supervisor–worker dyads affect inequality, although key bias mechanisms that shape gendered earnings take place in this relationship. Second, we contextualize power. Much has been written on the effects of human resources practices and equal opportunity innovations on gender workforce integration. Here, we examine whether human resources practices shape the way gendered power works, thereby contributing to our understanding of mechanisms of inequality. Because power shapes inequality through mechanisms such as closure and stereotype bias, and since formalized human resources practices are often intended to tame such processes, we reason that it is at the intersection of gendered power and human resources practices that we are most likely to see what works in reducing gender inequality in workplaces. The previous research is great in contributing to the Study and helps in understanding the statement problem.The previous researches left a gap that the current research aim at fulfilling. Will these women have the power to be agents of change? The entrance of a previously excluded group allows us to examine theoretical questions about the symmetry of mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. Can women provide women with the same advantages that men provide men? And how do specific human resources practices shape the way gendered power works? The current article explores explore whether and how gendered access to power is associated with gender differences in earnings. It also looks at the gender composition of management ranks and supervisor–worker dyads as indicators of gendered access to power in the workplace, and examine their relationship with the gender earnings gap. Also, reason that women's access to organizational power may reduce men's opportunity for social closure and reduce gender stereotyping, two mechanisms that researchers have established as contributing to the gender earnings gap. Because access to formal positions of power does not always translate to actual power, it examines whether the effect of women's exercise of positional power is weaker than the advantage exercised by men in similar positions. Also, it examines the relationship between power and inequality within specific organizational contexts. Again it looks at how human resources practices and subordinates' qualification levels shape the relationship between women's access to power and the gender earnings gap.Variables used in the study are the logarithm of the monthly gross earnings in euros including all bonuses as our dependent variable. We use monthly gross earnings rather than hourly wages because work contracts in Germany are based on fixed monthly salary rather than hourly earnings. The primary independent variable of interest is gender (female = 1); the main effect coefficient indicates how much lower women's earnings are compared with men's earnings. We use a series of interaction terms to examine the effects of human resources practices and women in management on women's earnings about men's.Hypothesis 1: Managerial Power Hypothesis. In workplaces with a larger share of women in management, the gender earnings gap will be smaller. To better understand the mechanisms by which the composition of power positions affects the gender earnings gap, we distinguish between the gender composition of management and gender makeup of supervisor–employee dyads. Regardless of the gender composition of the Directorate, direct supervisors can affect their workers' earnings through performance evaluations and through mentorship and training in firm-specific job skills and social skills necessary to succeed at the firm. Studies have shown that women's performance at work is evaluated less favorably by male supervisors and that more women directors are associated (in Sweden) with a smaller gender earnings gap. Thus we can expect that women paired with a male director will earn less than men paired with a male supervisor. Hypothesis 2: Male Evaluation Bias Hypothesis. Women with a male supervisor will have lower earnings about men with a male supervisor. Female supervisors may not be powerful enough to promote the interests of women workers showed that male supervisors were more likely than female supervisors to have access to resources that benefit their subordinates. Maume (2011) found that female supervisors were more likely to promote men than to help women. In Germany, with its high levels of gender inequality, such muting of women's supervisory power seems particularly likely. Thus we hypothesize that women have less power to advance female workers compared with men's power to promote men. Hypothesis 3: Female Power Hypothesis. Female workers experience less earning advantage from having a female supervisor than male workers experience from having a male supervisor. Jobs that require low qualification pay less, and thus earning increases are less costly to the employer and might cause less resistance. Huffman, King, and Reichelt (2015) revealed that organizational policies in Germany were consistently more likely to reduce the gender earnings gap at the bottom of the earnings distribution and less at the top. We, therefore, expect to see all predictions around women's access to power to be more pronounced among workers in low-qualified jobs.SampleThe sample size of the research was 5022 workers from 924 organizations in Germany. To be more precise, the analyses are based on 2663 men and 2359 women, from the said organizations. To explore the impact of workers' qualification levels on gendered power processes, information on tertiary education and divide the sample between high- (1,725) and low-qualified (3,296) workers was used.The method adopted was primarily due to researchers reflected on the two level structure of data, the hypothesis is explored using multilevel models. Having many workers in the same organizations violates the independence assumption in conventional OLS estimators. We instead model organizational influences on the gender earnings gap using organizational fixed effects and the interaction between level two organizational variables and individual genderConclusion, findings, and LimitationsThe article contributes to recent efforts to explore effective ways to reduce inequality in the workplace. It also explains to what degree women's access to powerful roles disrupts or reinforce gender earnings inequalities. It was found out that women are rarely found in managerial jobs. However, when they are, their presence is associated with lower gender earnings disparities. Moreover, the findings suggested that there were limits to the power of female managers to be agents of change. The positive effect of women's share in management is clearest for low-qualified workers. It might be expected, given that female managers are more likely to manage low-skilled workers, and that male resistance to gender equality may be weaker among the low-qualified, lower-paid workers.Again, there was the analysis of worker- supervisor dyads which offers a deeper look into the dynamic of gender earnings inequalities. It is evident that male supervisors use their power to promote theirs in a group. Women face earnings disadvantages when working for a male supervisor, compared to similarly situated men. The in-group bias of male supervisors seems to be an important source of gender earnings inequalities. These findings are in line with studies that have shown that male supervisors undervalue women's work performance. Female supervisors seem to be less powerful than male supervisors. First, women with a female supervisor receive lower earnings than do comparable men with a male supervisor. In other words, having a same-sex supervisor pays off for men but not for women. Second, compared to male–male dyads, high-skilled men with a female supervisor received the same earning penalty as did high-skilled women with male supervisors. Among the highly qualified, female–female dyads have the largest earning penalty. In a U.S. study, found that female supervisors were more likely to promote men than to promote women. Our findings also suggest that female supervisors may be more able to promote male workers, which is in line with routine gendered practices to favor men.Moreover, The research further finds that formal human resources practices that increase transparency, namely formalized hiring and formal career planning, offer means for women in management to increase gender equality among high qualified workers (Dobbin et al. 2015). It could be, for example, that given the transparency in resources created by these policies women in management can insist on formalized career development plans and hiring criteria that provide equal opportunity and resources for both men and women. That this applies only for high-qualified workers makes sense given that these are the jobs for which career planning typically pertains and that involve the educational credentials often targeted by formal job descriptions. Gender inequality among low-qualified workers is more directly affected by the share of women in management. Formalized hiring and written performance evaluations are associated with the lower influence of women in management on gender equity. The articles expected written performance evaluations to foster resistance by male managers to equality between the sexes, but we did not have the same expectation for formal hiring procedures. It may be that the meaning of formalization in hiring criteria is different for low-qualified workers from what it is for high-qualified workers. Among the low qualified, formalization, in general, seems to decrease the power of managers—both male and female—to improve the earning situation of their in-group.The research contributes to efforts to reduce inequality by pointing to mechanisms that may supplement and help diversity managers and task forces choose efficient routes for change. The differences between low- and high-qualified workers further suggest that the class context moderates these processes. It seems that methods that reduce the gendered nature of organizational practices, such as managerial integration, are more likely to decrease gender earnings inequality for low-qualified workers. For high qualified workers, this seems to be true only when formalized hiring or formalized career planning practices exist in the workplace. For low-qualified workers, formalized hiring instead appears to limit the female benefits managers have on the earnings of female workers.The limitation of the research is that it did not exhaust all aspects, also, due to dynamic nature, things change. Therefore, the holds implications for future research. It suggests that it is important to distinguish between the power of managers and supervisors, as female managers seem to be agents of change for gender earnings equality, but this is less the case for female supervisors. One significant difference between managerial and supervisory power is likely to be the influence on policies, for example, on the organization's adoption of corporate equal opportunity programs.
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