Publications by authors named "Jennifer L Berdahl"

Intersectional invisibility is a salient experience for women of color in the workplace and stems from their nonprototypicality in gender and race. We expand research and theory on intersectional invisibility to propose that women of color vary in their degrees of nonprototypicality, and thus in their social power and their experiences of and responses to invisibility at work. We present an inductive interview study of a diverse sample of 65 women of color in the United States and Canada, who work in traditionally white and male professions.

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#MeToo has inspired the voices of millions of people (mostly women) to speak up about sexual harassment at work. The high-profile cases that reignited this movement have revealed that sexual harassment is and has been shrouded in silence, sometimes for decades. In the face of sexual harassment, managers, witnesses and targets often remain silent, wittingly or unwittingly protecting perpetrators and allowing harassment to persist.

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Research on the work-family interface began in the 1960s and has grown exponentially ever since. This vast amount of research, however, has had relatively little impact on workplace practice, and work-family conflict is at an all-time high. We review the work-family research to date and propose that a shift of attention is required, away from the individual experience of work and family and toward understanding how identity and status are defined at work.

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We pursue the idea that racial stereotypes are not only descriptive, reflecting beliefs about how racial groups actually differ, but are prescriptive as well, reflecting beliefs about how racial groups should differ. Drawing on an analysis of the historic and current status of East Asians in North America, we study descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes of East Asians along the dimensions of competence, warmth, and dominance and examine workplace consequences of violating these stereotypes. Study 1 shows that East Asians are descriptively stereotyped as more competent, less warm, and less dominant than Whites.

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We examined whether stereotypes of Latinos as less warm and less competent than Whites guided perceptions of individuals in interacting work groups. Both Whites and Latinos rated Latino group members as lower in competence and warmth than White group members. This occurred in work groups with a majority of White members as well as in work groups with a majority of Latino members.

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Sexual behavior at work (e.g., sexual jokes and propositions) has been largely portrayed as offensive and harmful.

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In 3 studies, the author tested 2 competing views of sexual harassment: (a) It is motivated primarily by sexual desire and, therefore, is directed at women who meet feminine ideals, and (b) it is motivated primarily by a desire to punish gender-role deviants and, therefore, is directed at women who violate feminine ideals. Study 1 included male and female college students (N = 175) and showed that women with relatively masculine personalities (e.g.

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To date there have been no studies of how both sex and ethnicity might affect the incidence of both sexual and ethnic harassment at work. This article represents an effort to fill this gap. Data from employees at 5 organizations were used to test whether minority women are subject to double jeopardy at work, experiencing the most harassment because they are both women and members of a minority group.

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