Whether it’s how to design teams, evaluate leaders, or institute organizational policies, our research explores various aspects of how to (re)design work and organizations to foster more equity, fairness, and ultimately: improve performance, too.

(Don’t) Mind the Gap: Reframing Résumés Facilitates Mothers' Work Re-entry

Becoming a mother and taking care-related leaves from work contribute to economic gender inequality; unemployment gaps may function similarly and are more common now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So what can these job-seekers do? We integrate the judgment and decision-making literature to redesign résumés in a way that reduces mothers’ barriers to work re-entry. We test and replicate this redesign of a core piece of any job-seeker’s tool box—the résumé—in a field experiment and several lab experiments. See here for the published paper in the Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings and here for the final paper in Nature Human Behaviour.

Fix the Game–Not the Dame: Gender Equity in Leadership by Design

Gender biases tend to disadvantage female leaders (vs. men), while bias trainings often do not transfer from the classroom to the board room or even increase negative reactions to female leaders. However, leaders may not only be viewed as representatives of their gender, but also as representatives of their teams. Thus, to override these pervasive and pernicious biases by design, we measured followers’ reactions to male and female leaders whom we randomly assigned to lead male-majority or gender-balanced teams. Findings indicate that by making the local context within which leaders are perceived more gender-balanced, we can also restore gender equity in leadership evaluations. See here for the published paper in Journal of Business Ethics.

How Men React to Women’s Presence (in Teams)

All-male or male-dominated teams continue to be the norm in many industries, in the upper echelons of many companies, and in most venture-backed startups. When women join these teams, changes in team processes and outcomes are often assumed to be due to the ostensibly unique qualities of women. This research, however, seldom explicitly examines how men change because of women's entry and how these changes might account for changes in team dynamics and outcomes. Here, we challenge and expand the narrow and untested assumption that gender-diverse teams are different because of women's ostensibly unique qualities by reviewing research that considers how men think, feel, and behave in the presence of a woman or women (rather than being primarily with other men). Because such cognitive and behavioral differences can result from physiological changes (e.g., testosterone or cortisol), we also review research that examines men's physiological changes in the presence of women. We propose that findings from this literature should inform future research examining gender diversity in teams by suggesting men can change due to the mere presence of women. See the paper published in Current Opinion in Psychology.

“Maybe Baby?” Bias

A wealth of research has highlighted mothers’ many employment disadvantages compared to childfree women and men, such as reduced pay and lower perceptions of competence and commitment. But what if actual motherhood is not necessary for young women to experience motherhood penalties? Although maternal leave is ostensibly intended to benefit working women, this might come at the cost of their subtle social mistreatment (i.e., workplace incivility; see here for the published paper in Journal of Vocational Behavior). “Maybe baby” expectations may also increase perceptions of hiring risk for early-career women, but not men or mothers, which hiring managers compensate for by awarding this group of women with more precarious employment conditions (see here for the published paper in Journal of Applied Social Psychology and a more practical take on this work here in Psychology Today). Concrete methods to reduce these biases could thus include more equal parental leave and risk-reduction techniques in personnel selection and evaluation.