Sociology Prof. Kate Weisshaar discussed her research on gender inequality in the workplace during a colloquium hosted by Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research on Monday.

Weisshaar, an IPR fellow, researches the intersections of gender and race in the labor force and how inequalities are produced or reduced in work evaluation processes. Her presentation, titled “Visibility and Gender Inequality at Work,” focused specifically on the technology industry, since only about 20% of software engineers are women and the number of women entering the computing field has been steady or even declining in recent years.

Weisshaar discussed the role of interpersonal relationships in deciding which employees to promote, particularly the idea of “visibility” — making sure your work is acknowledged by leadership.

“The idea is that if you are doing a good job, you still have to be recognized for that job that you’re doing,” Weisshaar said. “Our findings suggest that visibility is not as clear a path to success for women as for men in this context of software engineering, and we suspect in other male dominated fields as well.”

While there has been a decline in blatant gender discrimination in the workplace, Weisshaar said men and women continue to experience different “rules of the game” to earn raises and promotions. 

Workplaces are social environments, and visibility is crucial when decisions are being made. Employees without access to higher-status people, including those who work remotely, are at a significant disadvantage, according to Weisshaar. 

Weisshaar also spoke about how women can be socially isolated at work, since they represent a minority within the tech industry. 

“Because we tend to network more easily with those who we perceive as similar to us, and because women are underrepresented in positions of power, women are less likely to have the network connections with these high visibility leaders that lead to promotion,” Weisshaar said. “If women are excluded from meetings in the workplace, and from social contact in the workplace, they might have less access to these higher status people.”

Sociology Prof. Simone Ispa-Landa, also a faculty fellow for IPR, attended Monday’s talk, and spoke about the importance of hearing what other professors are working on. 

“I think it’s key to what we do, to share findings. This is a great interdisciplinary forum,” Ispa-Landa said. “I think it’s the crown jewel of Northwestern.”

Weisshaar examined data from a Bay Area company’s software engineering division. She tracked visibility using employees’ attendance at meetings and examined whether visibility impacted compensation or promotion. In addition, she also tracked the performance ratings of employees.

“Men are much more likely to attain a promotion than are women,” Weisshaar said. “At the 90th percentile, low performing men have more than double the chance of a promotion than low performing women do. We find these huge gender gaps that are not overcome by increased visibility, and that low performing men even out earn high performing women when they’re highly visible for promotion.”

Retired NU employee Steve Alspach said he came to the presentation to hear about current sociology research. 

“It did expose quite a bit about what’s going on in the tech workforce, and there are still gender biases,” Alspach said. 

Email: carolinekillilea2027@u.northwestern.edu

X: @C_Killilea

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