An Unattainable Emotional Advantage? Supervisors' Perceptual Biases in the Relationship Between Emotional Understanding Ability and Performance Ratings for Female Employees
Empathy is increasingly valued at workplaces as it facilitates interpersonal relationships, collaboration, and team functioning. Accordingly, organizations increasingly observe and recognize employees' emotional understanding (EU) ability—a key foundation of empathy—as an important dimension of individual merit in performance evaluations. We note that, however, supervisors' gender stereotypes may constrain whether EU ability is recognized properly, particularly for female employees.
Setting Higher Referral Targets Increases the Number of Women Recommended: Evidence From the Field and Lab
Women continue to be underrepresented in numerous occupations and in the highest echelons of many organizations. This may be due, in part, to disadvantages they face in referral-based hiring and promotion processes. We propose a low-cost and easily scalable intervention to boost referrals of women in male-dominated contexts: requesting a greater target number of referrals (e.g., at least four instead of at least two referrals).