Title: Which Kind of Employees Benefits More from Gender Diversity?
Abstract:Extant research has shown that gender-diverse organizations tend to be more innovative than gender homogenous ones but has left unaddressed the question of who, among an organization’s workforce, beco...Extant research has shown that gender-diverse organizations tend to be more innovative than gender homogenous ones but has left unaddressed the question of who, among an organization’s workforce, becomes more innovative as gender diversity increases. We address this question by examining how gender diversity affects individual-level innovative performance, measured through patent-based indicators, within the R&D labs of the 40 largest pharmaceutical companies over the period 1985-2010. We argue that higher levels of gender diversity increase the performance of three categories of scientists – women, rookies, and brokers – whereas men, long-tenured scientists, and scientists embedded in constrained networks experience limited or no performance benefits. By demonstrating that gender diversity has a heterogeneous effect across different segments of an organization’s workforce, these results both deepen and qualify current understandings of how gender diversity affects innovation within organizations. A key implication of our proposed argument is that gender diversity does not only affect the overall performance of the organization; it also affects how performance (and hence the material and symbolic resources associated with it) are distributed within the organization.Read More
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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