Stephen Benard

Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?1

Survey research finds that mothers suffer a substantial wage penalty, although the causal mechanism producing it remains elusive. The authors employed a laboratory experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that status‐based discrimination plays an important role and an audit study of actual employers to assess its real‐world implications. In both studies, participants evaluated application materials for a pair of same‐gender equally qualified job candidates who differed on parental status. The laboratory experiment found that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary. Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent. The audit study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.

The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations

In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the companys core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.

Normative Discrimination and the Motherhood Penalty

This research proposes and tests a new theoretical mechanism to account for a portion of the motherhood penalty in wages and related labor market outcomes. At least a portion of this penalty is attributable to discrimination based on the assumption that mothers are less competent and committed than other types of workers. But what happens when mothers definitively prove their competence and commitment? In this study, we examine whether mothers face discrimination in labor-market-type evaluations even when they provide indisputable evidence that they are competent and committed to paid work. We test the hypothesis that evaluators discriminate against highly successful mothers by viewing them as less warm, less likable, and more interpersonally hostile than otherwise similar workers who are not mothers. The results support this “normative discrimination” hypothesis for female but not male evaluators. The findings have important implications for understanding the nature and persistence of discrimination toward mothers.

Biased estimators? Comparing status and statistical theories of gender discrimination

Gender inequality in paid work persists, in the form of a gender wage gap, occupational sex segregation and a “glass ceiling” for women, despite substantial institutional change in recent decades. Two classes of explanations that have been offered as partial explanations of persistent gender inequality include economic theories of statistical discrimination and social psychological theories of status-based discrimination. Despite the fact that the two theories offer explanations for the same phenomena, little effort has been made to compare them, and practitioners of one theory are often unfamiliar with the other. In this article, we assess both theories. We argue that the principal difference between the two theories lies in the mechanism by which discrimination takes place: discrimination in statistical models derives from an informational bias, while discrimination in status models derives from a cognitive bias. We also consider empirical assessments of both explanations, and find that while research has generally been more supportive of status theories than statistical theories, statistical theories have been more readily evoked as explanations for gender inequalities in the paid labor market. We argue that status theories could be more readily applied to understanding gender inequality by adopting the broader conception of performance favored by statistical discrimination theories. The goal is to build on the strong empirical base of status characteristic theory, but draw on statistical discrimination theories to extend its ability to explain macro level gender inequalities.

Cohesion from Conflict: Does Intergroup Conflict Motivate Intragroup Norm Enforcement and Support for Centralized Leadership?.

Classic work suggests that intergroup conflict increases intragroup cohesion and cooperation. But how do group members respond when their peers refuse to cooperate? Simmel ([1908] 1955) argued that groups in conflict quell dissent by sanctioning group members and supporting centralized leadership systems. This claim has important implications, but little direct support. This research investigates how intergroup conflict shapes individuals’ tendencies to sacrifice for their groups, enforce norms by sanctioning their peers, and relinquish decision-making autonomy to a leader. I test the predictions with two small group experiments, which find that conflict increases enforcement of norms when outgroup participation in conflict is high and increases contribution to the group regardless of outgroup participation in conflict. Evidence on support for leaders is mixed and suggests that the performance of the group may affect support for leaders. The research has broader theoretical implications for the study of group processes, collective action, and institutions.

An Introduction to the Social Psychology of Gender

The paradigmatic shift in gender theory, which focuses attention away from the individual and toward structural accounts, has undoubtedly advanced the amount and quality of research on gender as a macro-level phenomenon. However, social psychological accounts of gender have been less frequent among gender scholars in sociology, perhaps due to the perception that studying individuals might reinvigorate sex role and socialization accounts. This concern is especially understandable since sociology as a field has yet to fully incorporate current theories of gender (Stacey & Thorne, 1985; Ferree & Hall, 1996). For example, Ferree and Hall (1996) have shown that many introductory sociology textbooks still present gender as simply the product of socialization, even while examining other bases of inequality, such as race and class, at a structural level. Rather than rehearsing past debates, we argue that social psychological perspectives make a unique contribution to bridging the multiple levels of the gender system, and are especially well suited to helping us understand the ways that gender is achieved through interaction. Understanding gender as an interactive process sheds light on how structural conditions constrain individual choices as well as how structural patterns of gender inequality are generated and recreated. Discovering mechanisms at the micro level, which play an active role in the persistence of inequality, is especially fruitful because they suggest ways by which gender inequality might be lessened.

The value of vengefulness: Reputational incentives for initiating versus reciprocating aggression

Why do individuals engage in surprisingly costly aggression? Theory and research suggest that individuals aggress in order to establish a reputation as a strong competitor and thereby deter aggression from others. However, we know little about whether these reputational concerns lead individuals to initiate aggression or instead to reciprocate when challenged. Correspondingly, it is unclear whether initiating or reciprocating aggression provides greater reputational benefits. This study uses a behavioral experiment to investigate these questions and finds that (1) the opportunity to earn a reputation for reciprocating aggression increases aggressive behavior, while the opportunity to earn a reputation for initiating aggression does not; (2) reputations for reciprocating aggression more effectively deter aggression from interaction partners than reputations for initiating aggression; (3) reputations for reciprocating aggression are perceived as more convincing signals of underlying competitive ability than reputations for initiating aggression; and (4) individual competitive ability is an important moderator of the effect of reputation systems on aggressive behavior. The findings clarify the mechanism by which reputation systems promote aggressive behavior and help explain how the type of information available in a reputation system shapes levels of aggression.

Does Aggression Deter or Invite Reciprocal Behavior? Considering Coercive Capacity:

How do people respond to aggression? Theory differs on whether aggressive behavior deters antagonists or provokes retaliation, and the empirical evidence is mixed. We bridge contradictory findings in the literature by identifying a previously unexamined moderating variable: the extent to which individuals can increase their coercive capability (which we call escalating). We argue that when escalating is costly, aggression deters potential antagonists. In contrast, when escalating is less costly, behaving aggressively fails to deter aggressive partners. We test these predictions in two behavioral experiments that manipulate the cost of escalating and whether interaction partners are aggressive or deferential. We find support for deterrence predictions when escalating is either high or low cost but not when it is medium cost. Taken together, we provide evidence that the cost of escalation plays a key role in decisions about aggression.

Small Groups: Reflections of and Building Blocks for Social Structure

Our lives are tightly bound up in small groups. From families, friends, and peer groups, to athletic teams, voluntary associations, and work units, small groups constitute much of the fabric of our daily lives. In this chapter, we argue that small groups are important for sociologists to understand because they serve as building blocks of society, offering settings in which rudimentary forms of social structure can emerge. Small groups provide a place – usually the first place – where individuals learn to negotiate hierarchies, conform to or deviate from social norms, develop group boundaries, and where they develop and disseminate bits of culture. We organize the chapter around these five structure-producing social processes: status, power, identity, influence and social norms, and group cultures, and illustrate how these processes operate in small groups. In doing so, we illustrate the diversity of theories that have focused on small groups as the unit of anlysis. We also speculate about the reasons why sociological interest in small groups has declined over time, and suggest ways in which small groups researchers can further contribute to and play a larger role in sociology.