Gender and Opportunity in the Federal Bureaucracy

Abstract

This article tests Rosabeth Kanter's hypotheses that (a) promotion opportunity in organizations is related to several adaptive attitudes and bahaviors, (b) women have less promotion opportunity, (c) women are more likely to display the adaptations, and (d) when opportunity is controlled these gender differences are eliminated, using data from 897 employees in six offices of a government agency. Low opportunity was moderately related to bitter dissatisfaction concerning the promotion system and weakly related as predicted to four of eight remaining measures of these adaptations. Although gender was strongly related to occupational level, the segregation of women in lower-level career ladders was accompanied by roghly equal promotion opportunities for both sexes within the career ladders in which they were concentrated. Gender was moderately related to desire for security and interpersonal support at work, but is was related only weakly to four of the remaining measures of adaptations and related to two of these in the reverse of the expected directions. The sources of these findings in the structure of bureaucratic labor markets and the implications of the results are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 53 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.