The Impact of Employee Sex and Performance on the Allocation of Organizational Rewards

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Abstract
Evidence regarding the influence of sex biases on evaluations of women's performance is contradictory. Sometimes women are favored, other times they are discriminated against, and in still other cases no sex bias is evident. The experiment reported here focused on the sex-type of the job in an attempt to partially resolve this question. It was hypothesized that Ss' evaluations of the performance of an employee in a job with a neutral sex-type (librarian administrator) would be influenced only by variation in actual performance and not by the employee's sex. Under the guise of taking a “test” of their supervisory abilities, a student sample (95 males and 18 females) and a librarian sample (11 males and 36 females) evaluated and rewarded either a male or female, high or low performing “employee.” The results supported the hypothesis and argue for focusing further attention on the job sex-typing phenomenon rather than on general, person-centered sex stereotypes.