Gender inequality in knowledge-based organizations: Evidence from R&D scientists in STEM fields 1985 – 2010

This dissertation examines how intra-organizational networks interact with individual and macro-level characteristics to affect employees’ innovativeness and access to social capital in knowledge-based organizations. Primarily, my dissertation focuses on how such intra- organizational network dynamics limit or perpetuate gender inequality in the workplace. For example, I demonstrate that to enter the collaboration network of a high-status colleague, men and women need to follow different strategies. I also show that three employees’ characteristics, namely gender, tenure, and position in the intra-organizational network, explain why some individuals are more innovative than others in gender-diverse organizations. Besides demonstrating how individuals’ networks interact with individuals’ characteristics to explain gender disparities in the workplace, I explore how regional-level factors affect differences between men and women in organizations. In particular, I show that the level of gender bias in the region in which an organization is located affects gender performance gaps within organizations in that region. Therefore, I provide new insights into the mechanisms by which gender inequality persists in knowledge-intensive organizations, and it suggests possible avenues to overcome such gender disparities

Multiple Team Membership (MTM) and the Future of Work: How MTM Experiences Affect Knowledge Workers

Knowledge workers are asked to work concurrently on several teams, but very few studies have tried to operationalize Multiple Team Memberships (MTM) using a variety of metrics, above and beyond the number of teams. However, broader conceptualizations of MTM (for instance, different forms of context variety) could help appreciate some unique benefits and challenges for multi-teamers. Relatedly, we still need to more broadly understand how people interpret and give meaning to their different experiences in MTM contexts. This symposium addresses these pressing issues by presenting four papers looking at the interplay between various conceptualizations of MTM (e.g., number of teams, variety of perceived team inclusion, variety of perceived team prestige) and several underexplored individual outcomes such as creativity, emotions, thriving at work, and the likelihood to enter multiple boards. Importantly, the papers use multiple methods and multiple sources of data such as qualitative data based on interviews, quantitative data based on surveys, and longitudinal panel data. They also focus on the experiences of people when engaged in scenarios of MTM within the boundaries of single firms as well as when they work across multiple firms