The Field Guide › Paper

Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations

Brescoll · Power & Equity, Voice & Silence · Administrative Science Quarterly · 2011 · Paywalled

Three studies using archival data (US Senate floor time by gender and seniority) and experiments showing that while power has a strong positive effect on how much men talk in organizations, it has no such effect for women. Powerful women who talk as much as powerful men face backlash — perceived as less competent and less suitable for leadership. Women with power self-censor not because they lack voice but because they correctly anticipate the social penalty for using it. This is the empirical grounding for the structural argument that psychological safety is not equally available to all members of a team: for women, the calculus of voice operates under an additional constraint that has nothing to do with the leader's behaviour and everything to do with the status characteristics of the speaker.

Connected concepts (17)

• Calculus of Voice
• Language and Symbolic Power (paper)
• Men and Women of the Corporation (paper)
• Power, Approach, and Inhibition (paper)
• The Bases of Social Power (paper)
• The Forms of Capital (paper)
• Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open? (paper)
• Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World (paper)
• PS is Political
• Status and Cockpit Dynamics: A Review and Empirical Study (paper)
• The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? (paper)
• The Social Consequences of Voice: An Examination of Voice Type and Gender on Status and Subsequent Leader Emergence (paper)
• Typologies of Power
• Making it Safe: The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in Health Care Teams (paper)
• Reducing Power Gradients
• Straight Talking: The Sociolinguistics of Heterosexuality (paper)
• Barriers to PS