Men receive more credit from coworkers when they propose an idea than when women do the same, and neither group receives credit when bringing up problems their team may face, according to the Harvard Business Review.
A new article forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal by Sean Martin, PhD, Elizabeth McClean, PhD, Kyle Emich, PhD, and Todd Woodruff, PhD, uses two studies to inform their findings.
The first study surveyed cadets at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., over the course of training and execution of war games. The surveys measured how much each cadet spoke up and also collected the status score of each respondent based on other peoples' view of them.
The second study sent one of four audio recordings to workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk — either an audio recording of a man presenting an idea, a woman presenting an idea, a man presenting a problem or a woman presenting a problem. Respondents then answered questions about how much status they believed the speaker had and how effective the speaker was.
Across both studies, men were seen to have higher status when speaking up while women did not receive any benefit from presenting an idea. Neither men nor women received a loss of status from speaking about a problem, nor did they benefit.
"Managers who want to promote gender equity on their team — or who just want to make sure they are getting as many good suggestions from their team members as possible — will have to proactively work to counteract the tendencies uncovered in our research," Dr. Martin writes.