The Role of 'Contact' in shaping and reducing inaccuracies in gender stereotypes of women managers

Abstract

Various theoretical perspectives in gender literature have tried to answer questions like “why are women treated differently in organizations?" and “what is responsible for the different t:raits and characteristics exhibited by women in organizations?" The Gender perspective and the Organization structure perspective are the two main perspectives. However, ambiguity in research findings when trying to validate the above perspectives, led researchers to formulate the Gender Context perspective. The gender context perspective argues that since there is no significant difference (when age, education and level in organization are controlled for) in reality between the managerial characteristics exhibited by men and by women, the difference that exists, results not from actual differences, but from exaggerated perceptions of such differences if any. This concept of ‘perception’ is elaborated under the umbrella of Gender Stereotyping. It has been found that, though stereotyping by itself, is a neutral cognitive phenomenon used by all humans to reduce information processing demands from the environment, the consequences of such stereotyping are often negative in nature. The negative consequences of inaccurate gender stereotyping, such as, different performance evaluations for men and women, lower development opportunities for women in the management cadre, etc. have been well documented in gender literature. Inaccuracy of gender stereotyping is thought of as the incorrect estimation of occurrence of traits and characteristics (referred to as illusionary correlation errors) based on gender. We tend to overestimate the occurrence of stereotype-consistent behaviors while underestimating stereotype-inconsistent behaviors. Research has suggested that gender stereotyping could be reduced through gender diversity in the workplace, i.e., increasing contact between men and women through an increase in the number of women in the workplace. The purpose of this thesis was to explore the role of not only the quantity of such ‘contact’ at the workplace, but also the quality of such contact in shaping and/or reducing such inaccurate gender stereotyping. The ‘quality’ of intergroup contact has been identified in Social Psychology under the aegis of the “Contact Hypothesis" by Allport (I954), and has been well researched in racial contexts. According to the Contact Hypothesis, there is a reduction of inaccurate stereotypes and an improvement in intergroup relations by ensuring that the quality of such contact meets the five conditions of ‘equal status’, ‘interdependent cooperation’, common goal’. ‘authority support‘ and ‘friendship potential‘. It was hypothesized that prior contact, which meets the conditions outlined, would result in lessened inaccuracies in gender stereotyping of women managers. It was also suggested that by simulating the conditions of contact, between men and women, we could predict a significant improvement in the stereotyping inaccuracies of women managers. The thesis was divided into three broad pans. In the first part, the SDI was administered for a questionnaire survey to identify what gender stereotypes were held by Indian managers. In part two, the identified stereotypes were used as dependent variables, while the contact conditions formed the independent variables and another questionnaire survey was conducted to examine the validity of the hypotheses. In the third part, a first-step, one-factor experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that simulating contact conditions between genders could result in significant improvement in accuracies of gender stereotypes. The findings suggest that (1) stereotypes held of women managers had not changed much with time, (2) contact did form an important though not significant contributor in shaping inaccuracies in stereotypes, (3) there could be other equally significant individual factors which gave rise to individual degrees of inaccuracies and (4) short term significant improvements in accuracies of gender stereotypes could be obtained by the mere presence of women in contact situations between men and women. These findings could make a difference in the training Programmes meant for managers, for organizational policies, and for management education institutions, so That the future genre of managers produced could suffer less from such inaccuracies and their obviously negative effects.