Are you sick of inequality in the work place? Well, the solution may be to present a unified front according to a study coming out of the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin).
The study saw assistant professor of management at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, Insiya Hussain, conducting a survey. The survey was conducted together with Subra Tangirala of the University of Maryland and Elad Sherf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
According to a blog post from the university, Hussain surveyed 3 234 participants regarding gender equity proposals in three separate studies. The results of those studies revealed that when men and women join forces to push gender equity in the workplace, management is more likely to listen.
“When only women advocate for gender equity, it can come across as a niche concern,” Hussain said in a Texas McCombs blog post, “When men speak up about it, they can be seen as lacking the right to protest an issue that doesn’t personally concern them.”
The thinking behind the study was born when Hussain looked at how employees sell ideas to employers.
She found that when employers decide which issues require attention they look for two main cues:
- Coalition legitimacy – whether the messenger is appropriate for the issue
- Issue legitimacy – whether the message itself is important to the organisation
“On gender equity issues, women have the advantage in signaling coalition legitimacy, because they have firsthand experience with the issues and a personal stake in them,” explains Hussain.
“Men’s participation indicates that the issue is likely to be strategically relevant to the organization and of concern to a wider range of stakeholders,” the assistant professor added.
By taking this united front, men and women hit both legitimacy concerns. However, this is only true when it comes to gender equity matter.
“The gender of coalition members matters for sensitive, socially charged issues that implicate people’s identities,” says Hussain, “They don’t matter if you’re talking about customer service.”
With that having been said, Hussain also posits that a similarly united front could be adopted for racial issues. By creating a coalition consisting of both people of colour and white individuals, employers are hit by the one-two punch of coalition and issue legitimacy making it harder to ignore.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
