Page 198 - Discrimination at Work The Psychological and Organizational Bases

7. GENDER DISCRIMINATION
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A key issue is: How and why has performance been defined in this
manner and by whom? Does operationalization of success in terms of task
or contextual performance place men at an advantage over women? For
example, when work performance was defined strictly in terms of task
performance, there was evidence during the 1970s that women performed
less well at certain tasks than men including leadership, problem solving,
and risk taking (cf. Rice, Bender, & Vitters, 1980). However, more recent
evidence shows few differences between men and women on these core
task areas (Pulakos et al., 1989). Interestingly, CP (or OCB) has been de­
fined as helping others and has been considered to be necessary once one's
own tasks are completed; picking up another person's responsibilities if
needed, staying longer hours at work, and so forth. Yet it may be that some
employees are constrained by nonwork circumstances that make it more
difficult to work extra hours or to take on the tasks of another employee.
In other words, the shift to CP as an important facet of our criteria for
success will primarily benefit those who have the opportunity to engage
in those behaviors. Workers (both men and women) who shoulder family
care responsibilities may find that they are perceived as competent at their
jobs but "unwilling to go the extra mile" and are not seen as team players.
Career success, or the succession of (usually) related positions or roles
one holds through paid employment, is another important issue. Attention
has been given to what a successful career looks like, but I/O psychologists
have not paid sufficient attention to the relationship between careers and
the rest of one's life. Career success has often been defined in a way that
implies that family is less important than work (e.g., "successful" careers
often involve substantial time commitments). Rigid definitions of career
success may disproportionately affect the career success of women for rea­
sons described earlier in this chapter, related to their relatively larger time
obligations to nonwork responsibilities and the sometimes "interrupted"
nature of their job sequences.
Finally, if we turn to a consideration of appropriate criteria of organiza­
tional success, we note that surprisingly little attention has been given to
the role of work organizations in society and how they should be evalu­
ated (Murphy, 1998). During the 1990s, there was significant downsizing
activity among U.S. organizations with the intent of maximizing bottom-
line profits and short-term investor returns. However, there is evidence
that organizational gains from such detrimental human resource practices
exist only in the short term (cf., Cascio, 1998). Huselid's (1995) work on
organizations with strong, well-developed human resource practices finds
that, in the long term, organizations that value employees and devote re­
sources to select, develop, and evaluate their human resources tend to
have greater reported profitability (see also Huselid, Jackson, & Schuler,