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Cecilia Castaño Collado (UCM and IN3-UOC) Susana Vázquez-Cupeiro (UCM) and José Luis Martínez-Cantos (IN3-UOC) 

Higher education is reorganizing according to the logic of the marketplace. The modernization of universities has been running parallel to an increased competition, precarization and commodification of the academic work. And entrenched new management practices together with the global austerity policies, have had consequences in the production and reproduction of gender inequalities. Paradoxically, there has been a significant rise in the number of women in top decision making positions at Spanish universities. This seems a rather positive evolvement, yet analysis based on conventional and merely descriptive indicators may be hindering a not so egalitarian reality. Morley (2010) has pointed out that “[w]omen disappear when power, resources and influence increase” (p.387). So we decided to investigate what kind of senior management positions are women accessing? Are they appointed to leadership roles which acknowledge them as agents of change? Or, by contrast, they are blurring in less attractive new managerial positions? To do so, we analyzed the gender composition of vice-chancellors and pro-vice-chancellors of forty-four Spanish universities. Regarding to this, it is important to note the uniqueness of our research. Firstly, because in order to analyze the gendered distribution of the pro vice chancellors we have classified them in several categories-; and second, because after establishing categories, according to associated functions, we have tested the classification with a sample of pro vice chancellors. In view of the functional classification of the pro vice-chancellors, the results show an uneven gender distribution across top decision making areas. Specifically, and sustaining previous international research (Morley, 2005; Fitzgerald and Wilkinson, 2010), our analysis shows that women in top decision making are often involved in positions related to community engagement and care of students (graduates, postgraduates and quality), while their presence dramatically reduces in strategic areas (those especially related to innovation, technologies, research) and some management functions (mainly finances and infrastructures). In addition, the influence of the type of university on the gendered distribution of functions and positions in management and academic leadership has been explored

Male Champions of Change and Chief Executive Women say it’s time to face up to the gender ‘merit trap’.When we use merit as shorthand for a package of admirable qualities that we innately recognise, we devalue ‘merit’. Many studies confirm that we are drawn to those who think, look and act like us. This is a problem for women working in male dominated environments where there are deeply held beliefs and norms about who is suitable for leadership. Research has found that gender bias persists in many organisations, and even more so in self-labelled ‘meritocracies’:

1. One study found that the more organisations promoted themselves as meritocracies, the more their managers showed greater bias towards men over equally qualified women. Managers in these organisations tend to believe they are objective and don’t examine their biases, resulting in a paradox of meritocracy.
2. Senior men in Australian business were twice as likely to rank other men over women as effective problem solvers, despite believing that women were as capable as men in delivering outcomes.
3. A recent study of 200 performance reviews in a US high tech company found women were more than three times more likely to receive feedback about having a negative (aggressive) communication style than men, with women often criticised for behaviour that may be considered leadership credential if shown by a man.

COMMON BIASES THAT IMPACT DECISION MAKING

• Affinity bias is a tendency to favour people who are like us, resulting in homogenous teams and group think
• Confirmation bias happens when we seek to confirm our beliefs, preferences or judgements, ignoring contradictory evidence
• Halo effect occurs when we like someone and therefore are biased to think everything about that person is good
• Social and group think bias is the propensity to agree with the majority or someone more senior to us to maintain harmony

AN UNCHALLENGED BELIEF IN MERIT:

• Serves to hide gender biases and protect the status quo;
• Acts as a shield allowing us to assume that our systems and processes are objective, preventing more diverse outcomes.

CONFRONTING THE MERIT TRAP HELPS BUSINESSES TO:

• Access the full talent pool;
• Identify the best candidate for a particular role; and
• Expand business opportunities by taking advantage of diverse thinking, perspectives and experiences

In this article, we develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that when an organizational culture promotes meritocracy (compared with when it does not), managers in that organization may ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into rewards and other key career outcomes; we call this the “paradox of meritocracy.” To assess this effect, we conducted three experiments with a total of 445 participants with managerial experience who were asked to make bonus, promotion, and termination recommendations for several employee profiles. We manipulated both the gender of the employees being evaluated and whether the company's core values emphasized meritocracy in evaluations and compensation. The main finding is consistent across the three studies: when an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. This finding demonstrates that the pursuit of meritocracy at the workplace may be more difficult than it first appears and that there may be unrecognized risks behind certain organizational efforts used to reward merit. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms leading to the paradox of meritocracy effect as well as the scope conditions under which we expect the effect to occur.

A deterrent to recruiting students into STEM pathways is the stereotype that STEM fields do not afford communal goals to work with or help others. We investigate the challenges to cueing communal opportunities in science via brief exposure to scientist exemplars. Both male and female scientists depicted as engaged in communal work increased beliefs that science afforded communal goals and positivity toward science careers (Study 1). Without the direct performance of communal activities, communal affordances were cued only when a female scientist was prototypic of her gender category and respondents were highly communally oriented (Study 2). To change stereotypes that science does not involve communal goals, both female and male scientists can highlight communal aspects of their work.