TREATMENT DISCRIMINATION. SEX BIAS IN EVALUATION OF PERFORMANCE
The core issue in treatment discrimination centers on women’s performance evaluations in work settings. Such evaluations form the basis of decisions about pay raises, promotions, employee utilization, and training opportunities. First we will consider the differences shown to occur in evaluating the work of men and women. Second, we will consider the discrepancy in how male and female success is interpreted. Last, we will explore reactions to women in nontraditional careers and their potential implications for the treatment of these women.
One result of our society’s unfavorable stereotyping of women is the prejudicial evaluation of their work. That is, their achievements are viewed in a way that fits with our beliefs; consequently their work is devalued simply because they are women. Inquiries in the past several years have been designed to examine the scope and parameters of this sexually based bias.
A study by Goldberg explored prejudice toward women in areas of intellectual and professional competence. College women were asked to evaluate published professional articles representing several disciplines: linguistics, law, art history, dietetics, education, and city planning. For each article, half the subjects believed the author was a male and the other half, a female. Goldberg hypothesized that when confronted with an identical work product, women would value the work of men more highly than that of women. The results confirmed this hypothesis; subjects tended to rate all of the articles more highly when they were attributed to male authors than to female authors.
Using the same experimental procedure, however, Pheterson (reported in Pheterson and others) found sex bias to be absent in a group of uneducated middle-aged women. In contrast to Goldberg’s findings, these women evaluated the professional work of women to be equal to and in some instances even more favorable than the professional work of men.
A subsequent study (Pheterson, Kiesler, and Goldberg) attempted to reconcile the divergent results from these two investigations. Speculating that differences in the respective subject populations may provide the clue to the differing results, the authors suggested that as contrasted to the college students in Goldberg’s study, the uneducated women in Pheterson’s study may have viewed the very fact that an article is published to be an indication of success. It thus was postulated that when a work product has uncertain status, the man’s rather than the woman’s would be valued more highly, but when it is perceived to be of definitively high quality, the woman’s would be judged equal to or even superior to the man’s. To test these ideas, women college students judged paintings which were (a) attributed to men or women creators and (b) depicted as either entries or prize winners in art competitions. The data supported the major hypotheses: when the paintings were thought to be entries, male work was judged superior, but this did not occur when the painting was thought to be a prize winner. The authors thus conclude that sex-bias does not exist when a woman’s success has been proved by the acclaim of others.
Another study expands this notion. Heilman asked both high school students and undergraduates to evaluate the intellectual value and general popularity of two different course offerings when the instructor was presented as a male or female. Results indicated that when the course described was highly technical, requiring extensive knowledge of quantitative skills, no sex bias was evident. However, when the course described was not highly technical and more qualitative, it was differentially evaluated depending upon the sex of the instructor, with those taught by women severely devalued. The interpretation used reasoning similar to that used by Pheterson and her colleagues. It is argued that the fact that a woman has accomplishments in a field ordinarily populated only by men may in and of itself conclusively confirm the quality of her work, thus precluding discrimination on the basis of sex. A similar explanation can be made of studies by Hamner, Kim, Baird, and Bigoness and Bigoness in which women were rated as superior to men when they performed equivalently doing the heavy physical chores of a grocery store stock clerk.
These data, taken together with those provided by Pheterson and others suggest that not under all conditions are women and their work subject to prejudice. It appears that information about the quality of an individual’s work, whether implicitly or explicitly derived, eliminates sex-linked biases in its evaluation. When ambiguity exists, as is far more frequent, prejudicial evaluations seem to abound.
This thesis can account for the repeatedly demonstrated occurrence of sexual discrimination in performance evaluations conducted early in an employee’s tenure or by individuals who do not have continuous contact with her. It is only in rare instances that there is no ambiguity about effectiveness in either of these situations. But how can one account for the discriminatory treatment of women who have been on the job and for whom concrete evidence of their success is available? It appears that high performance evaluations are not sufficient to ensure fair and equal treatment. Other dynamics are at work.
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