Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives

Judith A. Clair; Kathleen L. McGinn; Beth K. Humberd; Rachel D. Arnett; Katherine  Chen

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives

by Judith A. Clair, Kathleen L. McGinn, Beth K. Humberd, Rachel D. Arnett and Katherine Chen

Abstract

While prior research recognizes that women struggle to maintain legitimacy for their successes and that self-narratives play a key role in building such legitimacy, theory provides limited insight into how women build legitimacy through their self-narratives. Our findings from an inductive, qualitative study of 40 women who rose to elite levels in corporations or entrepreneurial ventures during the latter half of the 20th century, despite considerable underrepresentation by women in similar roles, shed new light on how women narrate their own legitimacy. We build a theoretical framework showing how women legitimate their successes in the face of gender-based challenges, identifying six discursive legitimation strategies women use to explain and justify success against the odds. We also explore why women differ in the constellations of strategies they present in their self-narratives. While women universally pull upon multiple discursive legitimation strategies to explain their successes, we find that women’s social class origins and the organizational sector in which women ascended, either corporate or entrepreneurial, relate to the discursive strategies women employ in their legitimacy narratives.

Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Gender; Success; Diversity; Perception; Situation or Environment;

Language: English

Format: Print

77 pages

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Citation:

Clair, Judith A., Kathleen L. McGinn, Beth K. Humberd, Rachel D. Arnett, and Katherine Chen. "Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-014, August 2018. (Revised August 2018 for requested resubmission.)

Teaching Plan serves as a supplement to the case for “Chief: Role for Carolyn Childers” (920-019), “Chief: Role for Lindsay Kaplan” (920-020), and “Scaling at Chief” (920-021).

Article | Quarterly Journal of Economics | May 2020

Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment

Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Corinne Low and Kathleen McGinn

Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls nonmaterial resources—specifically, negotiation skills—can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention that increased noncognitive, interpersonal skills during adolescence. Long-run administrative data shows that negotiation training significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years. The training had greater effects than two alternative treatments (offering girls a safe physical space with female mentors and offering girls information about the returns to education), suggesting that negotiation skills themselves drive the effect. Further evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment, which simulates parents’ educational investment decisions, and a midline survey suggests that negotiation skills improved girls’ outcomes by moving households’ human capital investments closer to the efficient frontier. This is consistent with an incomplete contracting model, where negotiation allows daughters to strategically cooperate with parents.

Keywords: Negotiation; Competency and Skills; Training; Age; Gender; Education; Investment; Outcome or Result; Developing Countries and Economies;

Citation:

Ashraf, Nava, Natalie Bau, Corinne Low, and Kathleen McGinn. "Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment." Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, no. 2 (May 2020): 1095–1151. View Details

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Class Matters: The Role of Social Class and Organizational Sector in High-Achieving Women's Legitimacy Narratives

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