Collectively constructing gender-inclusive work cultures in STEM

Figures & data

Figure 1. A Tri-level framework of inclusive work culture.

Figure 2. Mean anticipated social identity threat by participant gender and experimental condition. Data come from Hall et al. (2018, Study 1). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 3. Mean anticipated positivity of conversations by participant gender and number of gender-inclusive policies. Data come from Hall et al. (2018, Study 1). Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Table 1. Items assessing gender-inclusive policies and practices.

Policy type ^a	Item
Flexible Work Programs	My company has Flexitime policies (i.e., work scheduling flexibility around the start and end times of the work day, though a certain number of hours per day must be worked).
	My company has compressed work-week policies (i.e., full-time hours are worked in fewer than five days).
	My company has telecommuting policies/practices (i.e., allowing employees to working from home and communicate with the workplace through technology, occasionally or full time).
Work-Life Balance Programs	My company has on-site childcare.
	My company has a fund from which employees can draw to pay for various costs such as child or family care.
	My company has paid parental leave (i.e., over and above basic entitlements).
	My company has paid maternity leave (i.e., over and above basic entitlements).
Promoting a Gender-Inclusive Culture	My company has cultural norms and values that support positive working relations between men and women.
	My company conducts diversity awareness training.
	My company has recruitment and business advertisements that showcase gender diversity (i.e., are there images of both men and women, and people of different ethnicities)?
	My company has physical working conditions (equipment, clothing, shower, and toilet facilities) appropriate for men and women.
	My company has a formal workplace harassment policy.
	At my company, all employees receive training on the workplace harassment policy.
Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement in Engineering	My company offers training programs and activities to both men and women that provide equal opportunity for career advancement.
	My company offers career planning programs to retain and promote women as well as men in the organisation.
	My company offers mentorship programs that give equal and unbiased access to female and male engineers.
	My company conducts benchmarking surveys to measure whether people feel that they are promoted based on merit.

Items Assessing Gender-inclusive Policies and Practices

Note. Used in Hall et al. (2018). ^a Items were presented to participants grouped by type (e.g., Flexible Work Programs, Work-Life Balance Programs, etc.). The items from the groupings Flexible Work Programs; Work-Life Balance Programs; Promoting a Gender-Inclusive Culture; and Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement in Engineering were combined to form a composite measure of gender-inclusive policies and practices.

Figure 4. Indirect effect of increased policy support on increases in women’s commitment via increased value fit. Data come from Hall et al. (2021). Reported coefficients are standardised betas.*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Figure 5. Simple slopes for daily social identity threat predicting daily burnout by participant gender. Data from a mega-analysis across the samples collected in Hall et al. (2015) and Hall et al. (2019; Samples 1 & 2).

Figure 6. Simple slopes for conversational acceptance predicting daily social identity threat by participant and conversation partner gender. Data from a mega-analysis across the samples collected in Hall et al. (2015) and Hall et al. (2019; Samples 1 & 2).

Figure 7. Implicit associations and participant gender predicting later organizational commitment.

Data come from Block et al. (2018). Organizational commitment was measured on average one month later. Higher scores on the x-axis indicate participants’ stronger implicit associations of male (vs. female) names with engineering (vs. family) words.

Table 2. A partial list of practical advice for translating our theoretical approach into action.

Top-down transmission

Organizations should select prestigious, articulate, and well-liked members to communicate messages of inclusion. Organizations could A/B test messages from different communicators for perceived trust and likeability, key factors in persuasion. Organizational materials about inclusion should be memorable. Values and policies should not be buried in guides or handbooks. Short, salient, specific, and self-relevant messaging in an infographic about how exactly the organisation meaningfully promotes inclusion will be more easily remembered and spread. Workplaces should make materials about inclusion easy to share and endorse. For instance, resources and images should be small in file size or easily linked online. Employees could also receive inclusive posters or stickers for their office space. Critically, organisations must track perceptions and effectiveness of these efforts for fostering inclusive relationships via clear metrics for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Community transmission

Learning by observing others is among the most effective ways to acquire cultural information. Organizations should leverage social learning when designing diversity and inclusion training, for instance, by employees observing examples of interpersonal inclusion (e.g., how to engage in allyship actions deemed effective by recipients). Network science can facilitate efficient spreading of inclusive norms. Organizations can identify influencers to model and spread such norms. This approach could also help identify and reach out to more insular groups of employees. Participative discussion groups (for example, Wu & Paluck, 2020) can build employee consensus and feelings of autonomy about inclusion initiatives. Messaging should focus not only on minimising and confronting negative interpersonal behaviours, but also on proactively creating experiences of inclusion.

Grassroots transmission

Collective action will be more successful when leveraging identity motives. Organisers should foster a strong sense of collective identity within their movement. For example, they might highlight a superordinate identity (e.g., engineers) of potential supporters, while also acknowledging the value of different perspectives within that coalition. Organisers should highlight that change is possible at all levels. Organisers could point to other organisations that have successfully created a more inclusive culture. Creating safe spaces enables employees to share their identity-relevant experiences. Making injustice salient should facilitate efforts to question and change the status quo.

Sustaining inclusive norms

Organizations should highlight institutional, interpersonal, and individual instances of inclusion. Newsletters can regularly feature successes of inclusion initiatives. Awards can celebrate employees who embody the inclusive values of the organisation. Organizations could include inclusion as a metric for employee evaluation. For example, managers’ performance evaluations could include a discussion of their efforts to attract, support, and promote marginalised groups within the organisation. Data collected from employees about their perception of the organisations’ culture should be made available via dashboards viewable by anyone in the organisation.

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