Congruence Between Self-Affirmation and Self-Construal Eliminates the MBA Gender Performance Gap

Abstract

We examined whether greater congruence between participants’ self-construals and the self-affirmation exercise in which they engaged would mitigate the tendency for women to perform worse than men in the MBA classroom. Participants varying in their self-construals were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: 1) an individual self-affirmation condition in which they wrote about a value that is important to them, 2) a collective self-affirmation condition in which they wrote about a value that is important to them and their ingroup, and 3) a control condition in which they wrote about a value important to someone else. We found that: 1) the gender performance gap, found in the control condition, was eliminated in the self-affirmation condition and 2) the gender performance gap was particularly likely to be eliminated under conditions of congruent self-affirmation (when those high in independent and low in interdependent self-construal engaged in individual self-affirmation and when those high in interdependent and low in independent self-construal engaged in collective self-affirmation). The discussion centers on: (1) specification of when wise interventions are more likely to be impactful, (2) consideration of cross-cultural differences in wise intervention effects, and (3) the practical value of allowing entering students to engage in self-affirmation.