Subtle Biases & Structural Change for Gender Equality at UZH

A recent article published in the University of Zurich (UZH) journal featured the 8 projects of the UZH Gender Equality Action Plan (2013-2016). For more information about the Action Plan, the individual projects, or specific results from several of the projects, see here.

As 1 of these 8, our "Assistant Professor Project" (together with Professor Bruno Staffelbach, Dr. Anja Feierabend, and Susanne Mehr, MA UZH) at the faculty for business, economics, and informatics was also featured. In this project, we examined the career and life stages leading up to and including the Assistant Professorship, to determine if this position is a suitable springboard for a professorship. Given that family formation overlays this critical career period, an event that entails more negative gender-based career stereotypes and expectations for women than for men, we also examined if achieving an Assistant Professorship (or higher) differs according to scholar gender, parenthood, or both factors.

Examining gender, parenthood, and the interaction of gender and parenthood (i.e., childless women and men, mothers and fathers) is key in light of the "maybe baby" bias, namely, expectations of risk that a young childless woman might have a child soon. In other words, scholar age is used as a proxy for childbearing chance, which triggers gendered expectations of uncertainty pertaining to temporary (during parental leave) or longer-term (drop-out from the labor market) cost and inconvenience for young female scholars, but not young male scholars.

In 2 peer-reviewed papers presented (2015) or accepted for presentation (2017) at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, a yearly gathering of 10,000+ international management scholars, my coauthors and I argue that even potential parenthood can be hazardous for young women striving to get ahead in their careers: we show that "maybe baby" expectations contribute to gender biases in employment through decision-makers' hiring decisions towards young childless women (here) and coworkers' and supervisors' interpersonal treatment of young childless women (here).

Our central recommendation for an evidence-based structural change to reduce "maybe baby" bias is to more evenly allocate parental leave to both women and men. Currently, women are allotted significantly more parental leave than men at the national- and organizational-levels in Switzerland. Although likely well-intended to aid new mothers' work-life integration, these gender-based discrepancies in parental leave allocation asymmetrically increase the expected cost and inconvenience of women's (potential) childbearing, but not men's. For more information about the Assistant Professor project or our other recommendations, see our final report here.

A new year, a new...uni?!

University of Zurich --> Technical University of Munich, that is. 

I'm very excited to announce that I have just accepted a new post-doc position (from January 2017) at the Technical University of Munich (ranked #1 technical school in Germany, #4 in Europe). I'll be working for Dr. Claudia Peus, Professor of Research & Science Management, as leader of a project examining how gender, parenthood, and caregiving influence perceptions of leadership. The team has a history of publishing high-quality research on topics such as diversity and leadership, so I should fit right in (except for my Swiss German accent!)

I'm really looking forward to joining a new, research-focused team of kind, clever, and motivated young scholars-most of whom I've already met at international academic conferences-and the challenge of making the most of my 4-hour commute... 

"Work-Life & Diversity at the University" Student Poster Session

During our poster session on Friday, December 9th, at PLM-103/104 (Plattenstrasse 14), my 16 Master-level HRM students presented 5 empirical research projects around the topic of "Work-Life & Diversity," showcasing their original analyses using data collected from ~2,000 early career academics from all over Switzerland. 

For more info, see our flyer, handout, as well as all 5 posters here.

"Reinvent your career...?!" International Dual Career Network

Happy to be sharing my personal experiences (and of course, some empirics) about international job-seeking, dual careers, career transitions/changes, and strengths use (10:15-11:15). Join us!

--> Download original flyer with active links here

Harvard Features 'Fix the Game-Not the Dame'!

I'm very excited and honored to announce that some of my ideas are getting some air thanks to Harvard and the Gender Action Portal, a curated collection of causal evidence to reduce social and economic inequality for women. I've summarized the paper below and included a link to the Harvard summary. Looking forward to your thoughts and continuing the gender equality conversation!

Fix the game, not the dame:
A team gender approach to leadership equality

Across the globe, stereotypical beliefs about good leadership are largely gendered in favor of men. That is, men are evaluated as having more leadership potential than women, and men are evaluated as better leaders than women-even when performing the same leadership behaviors. Similarly, local stereotypes typically also converge in men’s favor due to the masculinity and male majority of many managerial positions. In other words, men comprise the majority of leadership positions, a gender gap that grows with increasing hierarchy, which reinforces stereotypical beliefs about men and women’s leadership.  

However, leaders are not stand-alone actors-they can also be conceptualized as extensions of the group. For example, a CEO is also an employee of the company. If this proposition is true, then beyond leaders’ own gender or their gender match with individual followers, team members’ evaluations of their leaders may depend on how representative he or she is viewed to be of the group. Given the aforementioned gender biases, the growing numbers of women in entry-level and middle management positions, and the fact that gender is one of the most quickly recognized social categories, my colleagues and I tested this idea in 70 newly created teams of 927 students with leaders (more senior students) from business and economics in Switzerland.

Together with Professor Backes-Gellner and Dr. Manuela Morf, we randomly assigned male and female leaders to male majority (approximately 20% women) or more gender balanced (40-50% women) teams. After leaders underwent 2 days of leadership training and then spent approximately 6 hours with their teams, we asked team members to rate how exemplary their leader was, including showing the traits and behaviors of a leader. As expected, in male majority teams, both male and female team members rated male leaders as more exemplary than the female leaders. However, this effect was completely eliminated in more gender balanced teams. Importantly, there were also no differences in leaders’ own evaluations of their exemplifying a leader according to their team gender.

Thus, intervening at the local, team level can trump the more global, societal biases in the case of gender and leadership. Our findings are especially important given the lack of evidence that leadership training is effective or transfers to the workplace. Furthermore, female leaders often face social backlash for being too masculine or inauthentic when emulating more masculine leadership behaviors. If other organizational constraints prevent teams from being organized according to gender, managers should seek to incorporate the gender composition of leaders’ teams in their performance evaluations or 360 ratings. Finally, other more deep-level traits might also be important for team members’ benchmarking their leaders’ representativeness of the group over time (e.g., values).

Check it out here!

2 business PhD positions in lovely Switzerland!

For a PhD in HRM & Leadership at the University of Lucerne working with my UZH team and doctor father Professor Bruno Staffelbach (in the brand new faculty of economics), click here. 

For a PhD in Organization Studies at the University of Lausanne working with my colleague Professor Patrick Haack (in an active & engaged faculty), click here. 

SHARE NOW-both positions are research-focused, in beautiful locations, and well paid for PhD positions!

Best Paper in EURAM Paris!

After 4 days in Paris, plenty of new people, a plethora of papers, and so many socials, another EURAM has now come to a close. We had super Swiss scholar representation from the University of Zurich (e.g., Drs. Christian Voegtlin and Matthias Beck) and CDI in St. Gallen (Dr. Kyrill Bourovoi). It was a lot of fun presenting my new paper (with coauthors Xinxin Li and Sandy Lim from NUS in Singapore, and Anja Feierabend from UZH), 

 “Maybe Baby” in Everyday Employment:
Incivility at the Intersection of Gender and Parenthood

which was nominated as "Most Inspirational Paper" of the entire conference (from 1,500 submissions) and won "Best Paper" of the Organisational Behaviour Strategic Interest Group (from 183 submissions). We're excited and honored for the recognition-I guess we better hurry and get this paper published now... ;-)

Looking forward to seeing some of these now familiar faces from across Europe (and the world) next year in Glasgow!  

Dissemination & Student Presentations!

Congrats to two groups of my master's students from HRM Research from fall semester 2016. (From left:) Cristina Bucher, Lamprini Soufis, Ramona Mostafa, and Adina Bialas presented their papers from my research seminar at the recent Strategic HRM workshop of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) in Segovia, Spain. 

Gracias to my chair colleague Lea Rutishauser (middle) for serving on the organization team and to Professor Bruno Staffelbach (not pictured) for co-chairing the workshop.

Leadership Excellence & Gender Symposium with Thought-Leaders @Purdue

After a 3 day symposium filled with talks, discussions, break-out groups, and socials with an intimate group of 50 or so scholars and practitioners, I am reinvigorated with purpose, creativity (and criticism) of the persistent and pervasive gender inequality (as well as the research we conduct to improve the state of the science and practice).

A few thoughts and reflections:

• Thanks for the organization by the Purdue team and to my colleagues for their engaged participation! It takes a village. And resources. Bravo & danke!
• I am increasingly skeptical of the causal claims people make (or should make in order to inform practice and policy) in the areas of gender and diversity (Thanks, John, for recruiting me into your endogeneity army!). We need this sort of evidence to stir the pot and stimulate the snail's pace of progress towards gender parity!
• Since we as humans are so biased and inefficient in our decisions and in the management and selection of our talent, I also find it difficult to understand why nudges aren't being used to their full potential (e.g., see Dr. Iris Bohnet's (Harvard) "What Works: Gender Equality by Design."). 
• Isn't gender equality in unpaid labor just as important as gender equality and inclusion in paid labor? After all, paternity leave is just as important for women's careers as it is for men's involvement in their child(ren)'s lives and development. Let's not limit equality to half the population or one domain of life and lose sight of the bigger picture.
• Thanks to Professor Kevin Leicht, who reminded me of the ever-increasing social and economic inequality between classes. Let's not get wrapped up in making the privileged more privileged. After all, "A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." - Mahatma Ghandi

Jamie Lee, Ph.D.

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I just successfully defended my dissertation in front of my committee composed of Professor Bruno Staffelbach (chair of HRM at UZH) and Professor Gudela Grote (chair of work and organizational psychology at ETH), earning the highest honor of summa cum laude. Family and friends, colleagues from business, economics, and gender equality at UZH, joined me to celebrate on the 4th floor of Plattenstrasse in Zurich.