Are Organizational Gender Diversity Management Practices Effective?

Abstract

While organizations use gender diversity management (GDM) to promote women’s participation, it can have negative unintended consequences for their integration. However, integration is seldom accounted in GDM evaluations as it traditionally focused just on women’s representation. We develop a novel network-based measure of gender diversity which accounts for both representation and integration in a team. Specifically, we evaluate the relative effectiveness of different approaches to GDM using both, the traditional and the new gender diversity measures. This is analyzed using Bayesian Informative hypothesis evaluation of network information from 401 teams across nine countries and six sectors. We find GDM practices to largely be ineffective. This could follow from current efforts being misguided by traditional measures to focus on representation at the cost of integration. In fact we found the traditional measure to inflate the effectiveness of practices, as compared to the new measure. Our findings suggest that policymakers must consider integration along with the representation of women to understand the net effectiveness of GDM.