{"id":14915,"date":"2013-12-27T07:00:28","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/%year%\/%monthnum%\/%day%\/men-more-likely-than-women-to-compromise-values-for-career-success\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T03:25:30","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T08:25:30","slug":"men-more-likely-than-women-to-compromise-values-for-career-success","status":"publish","type":"short-read","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2013\/12\/27\/men-more-likely-than-women-to-compromise-values-for-career-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Men more likely than women to compromise values for career success"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"FT_13.12.17_EthicalCompromise-310px\"<\/figure>\n\n

Here\u2019s another possible explanation why there are so few cracks in the corporate glass ceiling:\u00a0 Men seem far more willing than women to sacrifice their ethical values in exchange for money or success on the job.<\/p>\n\n

Or at least that\u2019s the claim of two researchers who conducted a series of experiments that found<\/a> women were less inclined than men to sell out their values in order to win bonuses and promotions, keep down workplace rivals, curry favor with superiors or otherwise advance their own careers. \u00a0\u00a0\u201cWe propose that women, more than men, find ethical compromises unacceptable,\u201d wrote researchers Jessica A. Kennedy of the University of Pennsylvania and Laura J. Kray of the University of California, Berkeley, in the latest issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

There are other theories as to why only about 4% of senior executives<\/a> in investment banking are women, as are 4.2% of chief executive officers<\/a> at Fortune 500 companies (that percentage will \u00a0tick up on January 15 when Mary Barra takes over as General Motors\u2019 new CEO).<\/p>\n\n

Those theories include the lack of advancement opportunities for women, a paucity of female mentors and gender discrimination. A recent Pew Research Center study<\/a> on women and work highlighted how family pressures hampered working women from advancing as quickly or as far on the job as men.<\/p>\n\n

In their first study, Kennedy and Kray recruited 65 women and 38 men online using the Amazon Mechanical Turk website. The participants read 14 vignettes that described compromises of ethical values in order to make more money or enhance status on the job.\u00a0 For example, one vignette \u201cdescribed assigning a talented subordinate to peripheral projects and publicizing the subordinate\u2019s mistakes in order to prevent this person from receiving too much respect and admiration,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n\n

Then, study participants were asked to rate their reaction to each vignette on a seven-point scale in terms of how objectionable they felt it was, how upsetting it made them feel, how morally acceptable they thought it was and four other factors.\u00a0 The researchers averaged the 14 individual ratings, which ranged from 1 (\u201cnot at all\u201d) to 7 (\u201cvery much,\u201d) to arrive at a final score.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cAs hypothesized, women experienced more moral outrage and perceived less business sense than men when confronting ethical compromises made for either monetary or social status gains,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n\n

In the second experiment, 94 male and 84 female undergraduate students were read descriptions of jobs in consulting, wealth management and private equity firms. Each job included a description of an ethical issue that an employee would confront, for example, whether to invest in money-making companies \u201cthat used unethical business practices to produce profits.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

But there was a twist:\u00a0 After that brief description, some respondents were told that \u201cthe company\u2019s norms favored profits\u201d\u2014a big hint that their success on the job would be measured in terms of dollars and cents and not their adherence to ethical standards.\u00a0 Other respondents were told that the company favored choosing \u201cin favor of ethics.\u201d\u00a0 A third group\u2014the control group\u2014got no clue<\/a> about the company\u2019s preferences.<\/p>\n\n

Participants were asked how interested they were in working for this firm on a scale that ranged from 1 (not interested) to 7 (extremely interested).<\/p>\n\n

Again, they found that \u201cwomen reacted more negatively than men to ethical compromises. When a job entailed ethical compromises, women reported less interest in it than men did, despite exhibiting no difference when the job did not entail ethnical compromises.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, women on average rated their interest almost a full point below men on the seven-point scale (4.45 vs. 3.56 for women).<\/p>\n\n

\u201cIt’s not that men are totally into ethical compromises – people generally report negative reactions to them – but women’s reaction is more negative than men’s,\u201d Kennedy wrote in an email<\/p>\n\n

In a third study,106 college students (52 women and 54 men) were given a list of more than two dozen words related to business or law such as \u201cCorporation,\u201d \u201cAttorney,\u201d \u201cProfits\u201d and \u201cProsecution.\u201d\u00a0 Then they were told to associate them with words implying a moral judgment or condition such as \u201cFair,\u201d \u201cHonest,\u201d \u201cCorrupt\u201d and \u201cRuthless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The results showed that women held significantly more negative attitudes about the morality of business than men\u2014more evidence, these researchers claim, that \u201cwomen\u2019s relatively strong implicit association between business and immorality may explain why they are underrepresented in business careers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

About the authors:<\/i> Jessica A. Kennedy is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.\u00a0 Laura J. Kray is the Warren E. & Carol Spieker Professor of Leadership at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another possible explanation why there are so few cracks in the corporate glass ceiling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"sub_headline":null,"sub_title":"","_prc_public_revisions":[],"_ppp_expiration_hours":0,"_ppp_enabled":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_api_pending":"1713063911","apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_auto_publish":"","relatedPosts":[],"datacite_doi":"","datacite_doi_citation":"","_prc_seo_qr_attachment_id":0,"spoken_article_player_enabled":true,"displayBylines":true,"footnotes":"","prc_watchers":[],"_prc_fork_parent":0,"_prc_fork_status":"","_prc_active_fork":0},"categories":[],"bylines":[941],"datasets":[],"_post_visibility":[],"formats":[467],"_fund_pool":[],"languages":[],"regions-countries":[515],"research-teams":[],"workflow-status":[],"collection":[],"class_list":["post-14915","short-read","type-short-read","status-publish","hentry","bylines-rich-morin","formats-short-read","regions-countries-united-states"],"label":"Short Read","post_parent":0,"word_count":763,"canonical_url":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/short-reads\/2013\/12\/27\/men-more-likely-than-women-to-compromise-values-for-career-success\/","charts":[],"art_direction":false,"_embeds":[],"prc_checklist":{},"watchChildPosts":false,"watchers":[],"table_of_contents":[],"datacite_doi":"","prc_seo_data":{"title":"Men more likely than women to compromise values for career success","description":"Another possible explanation why there are so few cracks in the corporate glass ceiling.","og_title":"Men more likely than women to compromise values for career success","og_description":"Another possible explanation why there are so few cracks in the corporate glass ceiling.","schema_type":"Article","noindex":false,"canonical_url":"","primary_terms":[],"custom_schema":[],"og_image":0,"indexnow_submitted_at":null,"gsc_index_status":null},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"relatedPostsOrdered":[],"bylinesOrdered":[{"key":"182dfe0c148e8cc2a4a455a9c1717022","termId":941}],"acknowledgementsOrdered":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/short-read\/14915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/short-read"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/short-read"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14915"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/short-read\/14915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104142,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/short-read\/14915\/revisions\/104142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"bylines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bylines?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"datasets","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/datasets?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"_post_visibility","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_post_visibility?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"formats","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/formats?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"_fund_pool","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/_fund_pool?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"languages","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/languages?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"regions-countries","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/regions-countries?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"research-teams","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-teams?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"workflow-status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/workflow-status?post=14915"},{"taxonomy":"collection","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection?post=14915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}