Presenta: Pablo Escribano, UDD
Abstract solo para el mailing: Early work relationships are consequential because supervisors form judgments about employees’ abilities that can shape access to future career opportunities. Yet these judgments are often made when information is still limited and employees’ contributions are not fully observable. In such settings, self-promotion can serve as a competence signal by making accomplishments, skills, and contributions more visible to evaluators. However, this signal may not be recognized equally across employees. Because self-promotion is an agentic behavior that is more consistent with masculine gender expectations, similar behaviors may be more readily noticed and interpreted as self-promotion when enacted by men than by women. I refer to this discrepancy between enacted and recognized self-promotion as a visibility gap. Such differences in recognition may be consequential if supervisors rely on visible competence signals when forming evaluations of ability and making decisions about future opportunities. I examine this process using multi-wave field data from an apprenticeship program at a leading French business school, which allow us to compare participants’ reports of their own self-promotion with their managers’ perceptions of that behavior and to examine how managers’ perceptions relate to subsequent evaluations of ability and full-time job offers. The presentation will also discuss the next planned steps of the Fondecyt project, which extend this field study to examine more directly the mechanisms and boundary conditions that may produce gender differences in visibility and their consequences for workplace evaluations and career opportunities.
