Exploring gender bias in the Indian workplace using neuropsychological tools

Abstract

Even after the introduction of various employment legislations over the past fifty years and the growing popularity of diversity management programs, multiple forms of gender bias continue to exist in the workplace. Gender bias towards women in the workplace negatively affects women’s opportunities and earnings, which are manifested in the form of gender pay gap, the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions and the length of time required for career advancement to name a few. These disadvantages result in lower job satisfaction, lower organizational commitment and reduced performance among women leading to stress and health issues. India mirrors the same global situation of women representation in senior positions in organizations with women choosing to leave the workforce due to institutional and personal gender bias. Gender bias against women can occur during the process of recruitment and selection, pay, performance evaluations and promotion. Subtle gender bias also occurs in the way men and women are appraised in the workplace. Women are more frequently disturbed during work and their contributions are generally ignored. This continued negative bias indicates that organization and government policies have not succeeded in mitigating gender bias. This suggests adoption of different measures to tackle the issue. Formulating policies with the right perspective is important because it contributes to the social construction of individual’s values and preferences which in turn also impacts the creation and execution of policies. Thus, the attitude of an individual towards gender roles, appears to be an underlying factor perpetuating gender bias. Though the societal and organizational structure exacerbates gender discriminatory behaviour, it is the individual attitude that collectively transforms a neutral structure into an inhospitable environment for women. In the last few decades, one of the biggest determinants of perceptual change related with traditional gender roles has been the participation of women in the workforce. Another important aspect is that, although women's aspirations regarding their career have increased, they have not compromised on motherhood. In consequence, we expect to find that attitudes towards these roles have different orientations, assuming that people’s beliefs are highly correlated with their behaviours. Further, the way these attitudes correlate with the new distribution of gender roles remains unclear and will be empirically explored in this study. The aim of this study is also to see whether the specific support given by government and organizations through special policy measures have encouraged men to be more egalitarian in their attitudes towards women, or otherwise. For this, the present study explores the explicit and implicit attitudes towards gender by using different mechanisms to explore and compare the outcomes. The main contribution of the study in understanding gender attitudes consists of developing an implicit test in sync with the Indian culture and using neuroscience tools to further enhance and support the findings. The study has been conducted in two phases with the first phase being studied in Indian Public Sector organizations. The choice of the organizations was essentially based on the fact that individuals within the organization had awareness of gender issues and the organisations were large enough to enable random sampling across departments and hierarchy for selecting the required number of participants. The second phase of the study was conducted in a neuroscience lab to gain a deeper insight into mechanism of bias. In both the phases, the gender attitude of individuals was assessed using different attitude measures. In the first phase, the explicit and implicit measurement techniques were used. In the second phase, implicit measure and cognitive neurosciences tool was used to assess the gender attitude. The novel contribution of the study includes developing an implicit measure to suit the Indian context. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) used extensively to understand subtle attitudes in the west was re-modelled and used for to measure implicit attitudes in the Indian workplace. Further neuroscience techniques was used to develop a better understanding of attitude functioning. The study employed ANOVA and t-tests to understand the difference in gender attitudes among individuals at different levels of gender and work experience within the organization. The divergence in findings among explicit, implicit and neuroscience measures indicate the importance of using all the three measurement techniques for better understanding of gender attitudes The study applied the tripartite theory of attitude, attitude models and dual process theory to develop an understanding of the gender attitude in the workplace. The study attempted to address the gap in literature by instituting the need for studying implicit gender attitude in the Indian workplace for a holistic understanding of gender biased attitudes and its direct and indirect effect on individual behaviour The study of gender attitudes in workplace has critical ramifications for an individual, organization and society as a whole. The result of this study will provide managers with useful information when developing gender equitable policies as the results will indicate whether using individual’s explicit attitudes as an indicator of the true gender attitude might be an inadequate measure. The study has methodological implications as it tests the applicability of the suggested measurement technique (Implicit Association Test) within an organization, simultaneously as it explores socially desirable responding through existing explicit measures. The findings will have implications for the way policies are instituted and gender equitable attitudes practised by individuals as it questions the reliance on existing explicit measures as a predictor for behaviour.