“Opting Out” or “Pushed Out”? Integrating Perspectives on Women’s Career Equality for Gender Inclusion and Interventions

This paper integrates the rapidly growing literatures on the individual and organizational factors that contribute to women’s career equality. We organize studies into three research perspectives: career preference, gender bias, and work-family explanations. These literatures diverge on whether women “opt out” or are “pushed out” of leadership positions in organizations. Further, the interconnectedness of these “pushes” and “pulls” and micro-macro linkages are not well-integrated. This creates a lack of clarity about what scholars should study and what practices organizations should implement. We define women’s career equality as an individual and organizational phenomenon involving the degree to which women (a) have equal access to and participation in career opportunities, and (b) experience equal intrinsic and extrinsic work and nonwork outcomes compared to men. We bridge the interdisciplinary divides by developing an integrative multi-level model of women’s career equality. We propose that individuals’ career perceptions and experiences are embedded in social contexts reflecting the climate for gender inclusion and interact with these contexts to shape women’s career equality outcomes. The climate for gender inclusion has three dimensions: fairness, leveraging talent, and workplace support. We identify coalescing themes to stimulate future research, including attention to national socio-economic influences, improving metrics and measurement of gender inclusion climate, multi-level career equality outcomes, a joint focus on implicit and explicit bias, and designing cross-disciplinary interventions for experiments. In order to foster theory-based research that is linked to practice, we suggest implementing and scientifically evaluating comprehensive workplace interventions that integrate perspectives and levels.