Red Light, Green Light: Making Sense of the Organizational Context for Issue Selling

This paper analyzes the contextual cues female managers attend to when considering raising gender-equity issues at work. Study 1 provides a qualitative look at the range of cues indicating context favorability, including demographic patterns, top management qualities, and cultural exclusivity. Study 2 experimentally manipulates these cues and reveals that the exclusiveness of organizational culture is the most potent cue affecting willingness to sell a gender-equity issue. A discussion of mediators sheds lights on why cultural exclusivity affects issue selling.