A feedback perspective on intersecting inequalities in organizations

Abstract

Organizations show persistent gender-, class- and ethnicity-based inequalities between employees in terms of well-being, remuneration and representation. Despite decades of diversity scholarship, anti-discrimination legislation and diversity management, gender and ethnic pay gaps and harassment persist, and white male higher-class leaders are overrepresented in the top of organizations. Such inequalities increasingly meet societal resistance. Scholars mainly explain inequalities based on the demographic characteristics of hiring panels, workforce and management, assuming linear causality between these characteristics and the observed unequal outcomes. However, inequalities are more complex. This paper develops an innovative feedback perspective, conceptualizing the feedback of intersecting inequalities in organizations to further the theoretical understanding of inequalities. A feedback perspective reveals how elements of inequalities interact in such a way that they reinforce or balance each other. Such a perspective helps us to understand why inequalities co-occur rather than appear in isolation, why addressing a single demographic cause is often not effective, and how to predict the potential effects of interventions that address multiple inequalities simultaneously. We conceptualize the feedback of intersecting gender, ethnicity and class inequalities in a causal loop diagram of the pay gap, inequality in leadership positions and harassment.