Addressing the gender gap challenge using innovative research designs

By Jovina Ang

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – Despite widespread focus from governments and organisations driving advancement for women in the past 40 years, the gender gap challenge persists.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2022, a report that benchmarks the gender gap index across 146 countries, it will take another 132 years before gender parity will be achieved globally, including critical issues such as equal pay, female representation in leadership roles etc.

Researchers across the world have been busy trying to develop tools to address these issues as gender disparity in the workplace has been deemed as one of the key reasons preventing societies from reaching their highest potential.

There are many benefits for achieving gender parity in labour markets. It not only facilitates economic progress, but it also increases access to a wider pool of talent, enhances innovation capabilities, and improves performance for organisations.

SMU Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources Michael Schaerer aims to shed new light on this perennial issue by embarking on a large-scale crowdsourcing research project both in Singapore and around the world. He is collaborating with Christilene du Plessis (Assistant Professor of Marketing at SMU) and Eric Luis Uhlmann (Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, Singapore).

When Professor Schaerer and his collaborators received the news that they had been awarded the MOE Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 2 grant, he told the Office of Research & Tech Transfer: “This is such an important issue to address. The gender parity score – which measures gender parity on four dimensions, including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment – currently stands at 73.4% in Singapore and 68.1% in the world. At this rate, it will take at least five generations to get to gender parity.”

“My grant collaborators and I have also been working on a meta-analytic research project, which combined a large sample of field experiments across the past 44 years. While the research showed a substantial decline in discrimination against women in recruitment and selection decisions – likely in part due to structural reforms and initiatives that have been institutionalised by governments and organisations respectively – we still do not have concrete answers as to why gender biases persist in many other human resources domains (e.g., promotions, salary, etc.)”, he added.

“Furthermore, a significant amount of research on gender gaps is based on outdated experimental investigations in very narrow contexts, and it is not clear as to what extent these results are replicable today and can be generalised across the different cultural contexts.”

“The other concerning thing that I have noticed is that the COVID-19 pandemic has derailed gender parity efforts due to hybrid and remote work arrangements placing disproportionate demands on women to do unpaid care work for their children or ageing parents. Because of this, many women have opted to leave the workforce either temporarily or permanently,” he continued.

“As an expectant father of a baby girl and a member of SMU Diversity, Equity and Inclusion taskforce, I want to do my part to make sure that both genders have equal opportunities in the workplace,” he went on.

The research

The research team aims to commence their research in February 2023. Three separate studies will be conducted, and it will take three years to complete. A unique feature of the project is the sample size. A total of some 30,000 participants will be recruited across the three studies, which will be among the most comprehensive data collections to be conducted on this important topic worldwide.

The first study will focus on identifying the most robust and generalisable contemporary contributors, e.g., mental models and stereotypes that affect gender discrimination in selection and promotion decisions. This will help the research team to test several competing theories that are contributing to the prevalence of gender discrimination and identify specific areas where gender gaps remain pervasive.

As for Study 2, it will examine whether specific workplace incidents (i.e., on-the-job errors) can elicit psychological biases that diminish the perception of competence of female managers in stereotypically male roles. This study is designed to uncover insights to show under what conditions female managers are punished more for making mistakes at work than men.

Led by Assistant Professor du Plessis, the last study will determine why gender differences in negotiations continue to exist and what can be done about it. It aims to test competing theories for why female negotiators fare worse than their male counterparts in negotiations.

The three studies will leverage both online participants, primarily sourced from large-scale, representative online participant panels, as well as crowd-sourced participants recruited from undergraduate, MBA, and/or executive programs at universities in Singapore and around the world.

Back to Research@SMU November 2022 Issue