How Gender and Power Shape Perceptions of Meritocracy in Organizations

Organizations often assume that gaining power improves employees’ experiences at work, but is power associated with the same returns for women and men? Sonya Mishra examines how gender shapes the resources employees gain as they rise in organizational power, and how these experiences shape whether they see their workplaces as meritocratic. Across large-scale organizational data and experiments, her research finds that greater structural power is associated with stronger perceptions of resource sufficiency for men, but these benefits are substantially weaker for women. As a result, women with greater power become less likely to view their organizations as meritocratic, while men with greater power become more convinced that the system rewards people fairly.

Sonya Mishra is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Her research examines how gender and power shape people’s experiences and perceptions of inequality in organizations, with a particular focus on when and why people recognize, perpetuate, or challenge inequitable systems.