Archives of Scientific Psychology 2019, 7, 1–3 © 2019 American Psychological Association

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/arc0000071 2169-3269

Archives of Scientific Psychology

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SPECIAL SECTION: ADVANCING GENDER EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE

Gender Equality in the Workplace: An Introduction

Mikki Hebl and Eden B. King
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Rice University

A B S T R A C T

This year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of American women winning the right to vote. This right was a great symbol
of democracy and an essential step toward gender equity not only in voting but also in society as a whole. Unfortunately,
the tide over the last 100 years has not been as swift as the suffragists might have imagined. In reaction, we decided to
co-edit a special section of the Archives of Scientific Psychology focusing on gender inequity in the workplace. We invited
papers that attempt to understand, challenge, and remediate gender inequities. The 10 papers that are published here went
through the peer-review process, and we summarize the highlights of each of them. We believe that, as a whole, the
questions asked and results found help to define the current state of the field, identify challenges and solutions to workplace
inequities, and motivate future research and action.

S C I E N T I F I C A B S T R A C T

The special section that we have assembled includes 10 papers that address some aspects related to gender inequities in
the workplace. Specifically, these papers address (a) gender bias in winning prestigious awards in neuroscience, (b)
supporting women in STEM, (c) women’s concerns about potential sexism, (d) unique challenges faced by STEM faculty,
(e) the double jeopardy of being female and an ethnic minority, (f) gendered patterns of dealing with work–family balance,
(g) how women’s attractiveness can be a hindrance in the workplace, (h) backlash effects that emerge in gender-equity
intervention attempts, (i) the role social support plays in reducing gender inequities, and (j) putting women at the top of
organizations can make a difference to women at the bottom. As a whole, we believe these papers help identify challenges
and solutions for gender equity in the workplace.

Keywords: gender, equality, equity, work, workplace

When the new associate editors for Archives of Scientific Psychol-
ogy were appointed 2 years ago, editor Cecil Reynolds asked each of
us whether we might be interested in organizing a special section
focusing on a topic of our choice. After sitting with this intriguing idea
for a short period of time, I did what I typically do when I get an
exciting workplace opportunity. I approached my favorite friend and
collaborator, Eden King, and proceeded to talk her into coediting the
section with me. With promises like “it will be fun” and “we can make
a difference,” she did what Eden usually does—she agreed.
Settling on the topic for our special section was not difficult. The
year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of American women’s
winning the right to vote. Many women and men viewed the
passage of the 19th Amendment as a great symbol of democracy
and an essential step toward gender equity not only in the voting
booth but also in society as a whole. Although great strides have
been made in the last century, the tide has not been as swift as the
suffragists might have imagined. In fact, few would have suspected
that the United States would rank as low as 51 out of 144 countries

This article was published November 25, 2019.

Mikki Hebl and Eden B. King, Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University.
This article is part of the special section “Advancing Gender Equality in the Workplace.” The guest editors for this section are Mikki Hebl and Eden B. King.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mikki Hebl, Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University, 6100 Main Street-MS 25,
Houston, TX 77005. E-mail: hebl@rice.edu
 2 HEBL AND KING
rated by the World Economic Forum (2018) in its Global Gender
Gap Report 2018. This unacceptably low rating is based, in no
small part, on disparities in workplace equity and leadership. U.S.
women spend a greater proportion of time doing unpaid work each
day, are minimally represented on the boards of publicly traded
companies, do not receive equal pay, and do not get paid leave to
care for a new child or recover from childbirth. According to the
report, countries like Rwanda, Namibia, Cuba, Colombia, Burundi,
Uganda, and Zimbabwe all experience greater gender equity than
does the United States.
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Add to the disheartening data two other historical issues that have
recently taken place in the United States. First, in 2016, the United
States elected a president who has openly admitted to assaulting
women, has allegedly cheated in his three marriages with some 19
women, regularly disparages women based on their appearance and
abilities, and is attempting to take away women’s fundamental repro-
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ductive rights. Second, in 2017, women initiated the #MeToo Move-
ment. Although the upside of this movement is that women mobilized
and were able to voice their experiences, the extraordinarily large
number of women who admitted being targets of sexual misconduct in
the workplace was a gloomy look into the realities of women’s
workplace experiences. Women are clearly targets in the American
workplace. Our president’s reaction, meanwhile, was to state that “it
is a very scary time for young men in America, where you can be
guilty of something you may not be guilty of. . . . Women are doing
great” (Trump, 2018).
This special section, then, focuses on gender inequity in the work-
place and attempts to understand, challenge, and remediate it. We
hope to define the current state of the field, identify challenges and
solutions to workplace inequities, and motivate future research and
action.
After the standard Archives of Scientific Psychology peer review
process, a total of 10 articles were accepted for this special section.
We would like to publicly acknowledge the work of Frederick Leong,
of Michigan State University, who helped us by handling and even-
tually ushering in three of the articles for this section.
We lead off the section by first focusing on studies that show the
presence of, or yet unstudied nuances associated with, continued
gender inequities. We begin with a series of studies that provide a
greater understanding of inequality in the science, technology, engi-
neering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce. In the first STEM-
related study, Melnikoff and Valian (2019) examined the potential of
gender bias in winning prestigious awards in neuroscience. They
found that men earned more prestigious awards than did women, even
after controlling for institutional prestige, year of degree, and total
publications. They also found that the gender disparity in awards was
mediated by a gender difference in total cites and h-index. Their
results point to the notion that gender schemas may lead to women’s
articles’ receiving fewer citations than do men’s, resulting in more
prestigious awards for men than for women. They conclude by de-
scribing what needs to be done to promote gender equality in aca-
demic awards.
Young, Fa-Kaji, Cheng, Beier, and Hebl (2019) found evidence that
those who have supported women in STEM in the past may be most
likely to support women in STEM in the future. Specifically, they
conducted a field study and manipulated e-mail messages sent to
STEM professors who had previously recommended women for a
developmental program. The e-mails looked as if they had been sent
by individuals who were ostensibly male or female, who emphasized
agentic or communal goals, and who either provided individuating
information or did not provide such information. Results revealed that
those who supported women in the past were more likely to do so
again. Harnessing these allies to continue leading the way for gender
equity may be key.
In another STEM-related study, Gilrane, Wessel, Cheung, and King
(2019) examined how STEM inequality leads to not only sexism but
also to women’s concerns about potential sexism. They found that
STEM women fear that their supervisors believe that they are incom-
petent and that they reacted by undertaking mentally and emotionally
taxing behaviors to improve others’ perceptions. As a result, then, this
research shows that women in STEM careers face psychological
challenges that can impede their success, above and beyond the actual
impediments themselves.
In Liu, Brown, and Sabat’s (2019) work, they consider the unique
challenges faced by STEM faculty who are women of color with
respect to selection, promotion, and retention. They specifically sug-
gest that it is critical to examine the intersectionality of race⫺ethnicity
and gender. They propose that when the specific issues that women of
color faculty face are considered, these women are more likely to
thrive professionally and feel like they matter to the institution. They
examined different types of interventions and data to determine
whether they are successful.
Derous and Pepermans (2019) examined the importance of inter-
sectionality beyond STEM and suggest that this is critical to a more
comprehensive understanding of gender inequality. They focused on
the impact of “double jeopardy,” or of belonging to two social groups
that are devalued (e.g., being female and belonging to an ethnic
minority group). Belgian human resources professionals evaluated
resumes of a native Belgian or a Maghreb/Arab (ethnic minority
group in Belgium) man or woman who applied for a cognitively
demanding or nondemanding job. The double jeopardy effect emerged
for the cognitively demanding but not nondemanding job. Derous and
Pepermans suggest the need for considering discrimination and reme-
diation from a more complex perspective.
Intersectionality was also implicitly emphasized by Frear, Paustian-
Underdahl, Halbesleben, and French (2019), who reveal the gendered
pattern of dealing with work⫺family balance may lead to greater
gendered workplace inequities. To explore the intersection of gender
and parental status, they blended qualitative and quantitative methods
to examine the strategies used by men and women with varying
degrees of career centrality to balance work and family. Their results
suggest that although both men and women adjust their work to meet
family demands, only women consider leaving their jobs altogether.
This gendered distribution of work⫺family decision-making may
partially account for gender inequalities at work.
Next, Johnson and Chan (2019) raise awareness that women’s
attractiveness—which has long been considered a benefit in employee
selection— can actually be a big hindrance. In a series of studies, they
researched the “beauty is beastly” effect and found that the presence
of a second attractive decoy job candidate in the hiring pool can
actually decrease this effect. They explain the effect and suggest the
importance of context for gender bias.
We next move on to considering the host of interventions that have
been and continue to be recommended in bias reduction. We begin
with an important article by Caleo and Heilman (2019), who warn us
that sometimes even the best intended gender-equity interventions can
have backlash effects, or unintended and detrimental consequences,
for women. These consequences may include unintentionally promot-
ing gender stereotyping, reducing personal accountability for address-
ing bias, fueling misperceptions of undeserved preferences, and
prompting negative trickle-down effects (pp. 72–74). This cautionary
stance is important for even the most well meaning gender scholars
and managers.
 GENDER EQUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE
We move on to Cortland and Kinias’s (2019) research showing the
important role that workplace social support for women can play in
reducing gender inequities. They examined the psychological benefits
of different sources of workplace social support in a sample of
professional women leaders from 72 different countries and found that
informal (but not formal) support from mentors⫺sponsors, supervi-
sors, and peers all directly predict women’s work satisfaction. They
discuss the benefits of workplace social support for efforts to reduce
work-related gender inequities.
Finally, we end this section with the work of Madera, Ng, Sunder-
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mann, and Hebl (2019), who show that putting women at the top can
make a difference to women at the bottom. More specifically, they
manipulated a hypothetical organization to have either 53%, 23%, or
3% women in top management. Female participants were more at-
tracted to the organization that had more women at the top and
perceived these organizations to be fairer for women. Thus, this
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research suggests that not only are these organizations fairer when
they put greater numbers of women in top management but they are
also seen as fairer and become more attractive to women.
Although this section focused predominantly (with two exceptions)
on the experiences of women in the U.S. workforce, we hope future
research will also better voice women’s experiences beyond the
borders of the United States. We are interested in examining experi-
ences of women in the Scandinavian countries, where women and
men share a greater degree of gender equality. And we are also
interested in shining the spotlight on research in countries where
gender equity is far worse than it is in the United States. But for now,
we will leave a more global focus to perhaps a future section.
In sum, we are delighted with the 10 articles that we helped usher
into this special section and hope that you will enjoy them as much as
we did. Moreover, we hope that you will be inspired to take action to
work toward greater gender equity in the workplace and beyond. With
everyone on board, all things are possible, and we think that includes
a workplace that is fair to both men and women.
References
Caleo, S., & Heilman, M. E. (2019). What could go wrong? Some unintended
consequences of gender bias interventions. Archives of Scientific Psychol-
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3
Cortland, C. I., & Kinias, Z. (2019). Stereotype threat and women’s work
satisfaction: The importance of role models. Archives of Scientific Psychol-
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Derous, E., & Pepermans, R. (2019). Gender discrimination in hiring: Inter-
sectional effects with ethnicity and cognitive job demands. Archives of
Scientific Psychology, 7, 40 – 49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/arc0000061
Frear, K. A., Paustian-Underdahl, S. C., Halbesleben, J. R. B., & French, K. A.
(2019). Strategies for work–family management at the intersection of
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Johnson, S. K., & Chan, E. (2019). Can looks deceive you? Attractive decoys
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Received July 8, 2019
Accepted July 8, 2019 䡲