What is it about?
As data increasingly inform every aspect of our lives, gender discrimination in the collection and application of female-based data has also risen. Because data are primarily sourced from (white) men, the solutions we design to address global problems are also primarily based on men, i.e. male bodies, male preferences and prototypical male life choices. The Gender Data Gap – referring to the circumstance that most data on which organisational decisions are based appear to be biased in favour of (white) men – describes this very absence of information about aspects of women's lives. In this article, we not only demonstrate how the Gender Data Gap (negatively) impacts society and management science, but also highlight how the gap can be overcome in the long run. Further, we showcase several initiatives, particularly European ones, that suggest opportunities to gradually close the Gender Data Gap.
Featured Image
Photo by Jonathan Wells on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Half of the Earth's population are women. Nevertheles the Gender Data Gap – referring to the circumstance that most data on which organisational decisions are based appear to be biased in favour of (white) men – describes this very absence of information about aspects of women's lives.
Perspectives
When considering which interventions might be potent in minimising the Gender Data Gap and its long-lasting impact on women, the considerations in our paper suggest two possible routes, one tackling the data gap itself and the other attenuating its negative consequences for women. The normative approach suggests that interventions at the organisational and cultural levels might be more successful than interventions at the individual level, especially in organisational cultures that create and perpetuate the Gender Data Gap through strong masculine norms. However, exemplary leadership by managers might be a potent intervention to decrease the Gender Data Gap. This might, for instance, be reflected by using appropriate data to correct for the differential impact on women's and men's careers and by publicly rejecting hyper-masculine norms (Berdahl, Cooper, Glick, Livingston, & Williams, 2018). For the long-term success with an actual noticeable change for women, we propose that managers, leaders and management and organisation scholars should approach the development and facilitation of the existing data gap as well as its effects on women's careers and wellbeing should from a multi-phenomenal and multi-level perspective that comprises leadership, values, norms and goals at the managerial and organisational levels.
Prof. Dr. Cordula BARZANTNY
Toulouse Business School
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Gender Data Gap and its impact on management science — Reflections from a European perspective, European Management Journal, February 2023, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2022.11.006.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
