Pathways Toward Change: How Ideologies About Inequality Shape the Implementation of Gender Equality

• In Event: 3459 - Women’s STEM Underrepresentation: Roles of Employees, Organizations, and Institutions

Abstract

Companies have devoted significant resources to diversity programs, yet such programs are often largely ineffective (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly 2006). Cultivating an organizational commitment to diversity is critical (Duguid and Thomas-Hunt 2015), yet scholars lack a clear understanding of how top executives conceptualize change. In this paper, I conducted a year-long case study of a Silicon Valley technology company implementing a gender equality initiative. Using 50 interviews and observation of 80 meetings, (focusing in particular on 32 interviews with 19 high-level executives), I explore how high-level executives’ ideologies about inequality impacted their change efforts. I find that executives tend to favor individualistic and societal explanations of gender differences and inequality, and these explanations correspond with change efforts mainly focused on altering individuals or affecting external communities. Executives rarely engaged in attempts to change the organization structurally. Thus the implementation of gender equality remains limited by top executives’ ideas and assumptions about the sources of inequality.

Author

• Alison Wynn, Stanford University