Gender Differences In Award Choice

Awards are ubiquitous in organizations, and are only increasing in use over time. Extant literature on gender and awards finds that women who win awards get less money and prestige, but fails to pin down the mechanisms through which this effect occurs. Our research examines which awards designators choose to give women versus men, and how they value each award. We borrow from status characteristics theory to support our hypotheses, and propose that matching occurs such that lower status group are paired with lower prestige awards. Furthermore, we plan to look at what effect receiving service awards has on subsequent performance. We hypothesize a Matthew effect: when women in both the experimental and control groups are given service awards, they will double down on service, which will further hurt their performance through decreasing the amount of time they dedicate to performance tasks.