GENSDOM · Gender and Social dominance In the Modern World

Prior research has focused on how organizations achieve gender equality in terms of numbers, and found mixed results regarding the benefits of gender diversity to performance. In this project, I delve deep into the dynamics of gender and social dominance to understand the drivers of women representation in top management teams and the strategic implications of gender difference in social dominance across countries. Attempting to shed light on this urging topic, I combine insights from the social psychology, behavioral strategy, and international business literatures in order to develop and test novel hypotheses about how social dominance affects gender equality in top management teams and organizations' strategic decision-making. I will focus on four related research questions:1) Is there a gender difference in social dominance among TMT members? 2) How do gender differences in social dominance influence top managers' contribution to strategic decision-making? 3) Do social dominant CEOs invest less in diversity and inclusion (D&I) policies? 4) How do gender differences in social dominance affect strategic decision-making, and D&I policies across different countries? In order to test my predictions, I use different research methodologies across different countries, to collect a novel large-scale database from a variety of sources including supervised machine learning based indicators of social dominance, surveys, databases and Glassdoor.com. The ambitious goal of this interdisciplinary project is to open a research stream which explores how gender differences in social dominance influence top executives, top management teams and organizations. The results have both an ethical and a business impact as they may help organizations to create more diverse top management teams, enrich managerial behaviors throughout the firm, motivate women in middle management, and improve firm performance.