Nowadays, many companies are committed to equality and communicate that they support women’s advancement, diversity, or equal opportunities. Other companies place particular emphasis on performance and uniform assessment standards. Do these corporate values change how people view women’s and men’s professional success?

ISS researcher Paula Protsch (also Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training), Lena Hipp, WZB Berlin Social Science Center and University of Potsdam, and Kristin Kelley, American Institutes for Research, conducted a recent study on this topic. In a survey experiment, the participants each read a short description of a recently promoted employee in a large company. The survey randomly varied whether this employee was a man or a woman and whether the company was committed to performance principles, women’s advancement, or equal opportunities. The scenarios were identical in all other respects.

The results show that when companies value women’s advancement or equal opportunities, women’s success is less likely to be judged as fair or attributed to intelligence and effort than when companies emphasize performance and uniform assessment standards. The reverse is true for men. Men’s promotion is perceived as fairer and attributed to a greater extent to their intelligence and effort when companies prioritize performance principles

At the same time, in all three organizational types, women’s promotions are seen as fairer and their professional success is attributed to a greater or at least equal extent to their intelligence and effort as is the case for men. Presumably, respondents thought that women had to be smarter and harder-working than men to be promoted in their organizations. Women's and men’s promotions were viewed most similarly when they were promoted in organizations committed to women’s advancement. In this respect, the results should be interpreted as arguments for and not against organizational policies to advance equality.