
It is fair to say that the discussion of that book is a
sideshow for most women with careers. They care about the hiring and promotion
decisions that they are exposed to, and they doubt that these are fair. That
makes sense: why should they be any different from the others? Chances are that they have been hit by unfair
promotion criteria at some point in their career.
Now research by Raina Brands and Isabel Fernandez-Mateo in Administrative Science Quarterly has revealed a cruel twist on this story. In
turns out that people adapt their behaviors to the fairness of the system they
are in. If they are treated fairly, they will reach for opportunities. If they
are given signals that they belong in a group, they seek to join it. And once
you think about those two mechanisms, it is obvious what happens to women
seeking executive positions. They are not treated fairly and felt to belong,
and the rejections from positions that they (often) should have gained
discourages them from reaching for new opportunities. After all, who plays a
losing hand? Naturally this accumulates over time, because more experience
means more rejections, so exactly the women best placed to become executives
are most likely to think they cannot reach that level.
This is not just a story about women. Unfair treatment can
hold back a group in the short run. In the longer run it creates discouragement
and resentment, and the members of the group starts holding themselves back.
They are leaning out of the unfair
system, looking for better places to work.
The labor market gets split as they avoid the career paths with unfair
treatment, and organizations need to fill their positions from an increasingly
narrow and less talented pool of applicants. The firm that shows through its
hiring that it has a problem with female, black, Muslim, and Hispanic job
applicants will learn the long-term consequences of narrow hiring.