Evening the Odds in a Gendered Workplace: The Empowering Role of Knowledge Repositories

As organizations become more diverse, women are increasingly entering traditionally male-dominated technical fields like HVAC repair. However, in these gendered workplaces, women face structural biases that limit their access to the informal knowledge sharing networks crucial for task performance while also encountering significant barriers to promotion and career advancement. This study examines how access to codified organizational knowledge through online repositories can help women circumvent these workplace disadvantages, enabling them to enhance their performance and improve their prospects for professional success. Accessing general knowledge from a knowledge repository on a just-in-time basis helps improve female technician’s performance. These female technicians’ comprehensive information processing approach is the underlying mechanism of why women can better utilize general knowledge in general documents to aid independent problem solving in the field. Also, although women in this male-gendered domain face barrier to promotion, accessing more firm-specific knowledge from problem-solution documents increases their likelihood of being promoted within the firm, helping them mitigate some of the extant bias against women. General knowledge on the other hand helps women find external opportunities for career advancement.