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Papers by Susan Fisk

Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1

A key goal of many computer science education efforts is to increase the number and diversity of ... more A key goal of many computer science education efforts is to increase the number and diversity of students who persist in the field of computer science and into computing careers. Many interventions have been developed in computer science designed to increase students' persistence in computing. However, it is often difficult to measure the efficacy of such interventions, as measuring actual persistence by tracking student enrollments and career placements after an intervention is difficult and time-consuming, and sometimes even impossible. In the social sciences, attitudinal research is often used to solve this problem, as attitudes can be collected in survey form around the same time that interventions are introduced and are predictive of behavior. This can allow researchers to assess the potential efficacy of an intervention before devoting the time and energy to conduct a longitudinal analysis. In this paper, we develop and validate a scale to measure intentions to persist in computing, and demonstrate its use in predicting actual persistence as defined by enrolling in another computer science course within two semesters. We conduct two analyses to do this: First, we develop a computing persistence index and test whether our scale has high alpha reliability and whether our scale predicts actual persistence in computing using students' course enrollments. Second, we conduct analyses to reduce the number of items in the scale, to make the scale easy for others to include in their own research. This paper contributes to research on computing education by developing and validating a novel measure of intentions to persist in computing, which can be used by computer science educators to evaluate potential interventions. This paper also creates a short version of the index, to ease implementation.

Social Psychology Quarterly

This article presents results from an experimental study of workers tasked with evaluating profes... more This article presents results from an experimental study of workers tasked with evaluating professionals with identical workplace performances who differed with respect to hours worked and gender, isolating two mechanisms through which overwork leads to workplace inequality. Evaluators allocated greater organizational rewards to overworkers and perceived overworkers more favorably compared to full-time workers who performed similarly in less time, a practice that disproportionately rewards men over equivalently performing, more efficient women. Additionally, the magnitude of the overwork premium is greater for men than for women. We then use path analyses to explore the processes by which evaluators make assumptions about worker characteristics. We find overwork leads to greater organizational rewards primarily because employees who overwork are perceived as more committed—and, to a lesser extent, more competent—than full-time workers, although women’s overwork does not signal commi...

Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1

Are women less likely to persist in computer science because of gender differences in self-assess... more Are women less likely to persist in computer science because of gender differences in self-assessed computing ability? And why do gender differences exist in self-assessments among women and men who earn the same grades? We use a mixed-method research design to answer these questions, utilizing both quantitative survey data (n = 764) and qualitative interview data (n = 59) from students in introductory computing courses at a large U.S. state university. Quantitatively, we find that women self-assess their computing ability significantly lower than men who earn the same grades, and that these lower self-assessments reduce the likelihood that women enroll in future CS courses (relative to men who earn equivalent grades). Qualitatively, we explore how women and men perceive their own computing ability to understand why women self-assess their ability lower than men. Our interviews revealed that women were much less likely than men to make favorable comparative judgements about their ability relative to their classmates. Women also had higher personal performance standards than men. Lastly, women were more likely than men to experience disrespectful treatment, with an undertone of presumed incompetence, from their TAs and classmates. In sum, this research furthers our understanding of why gender differences exist in self-assessments of computing ability and how these differences can contribute to gender disparities in computing persistence. It also draws attention to the importance of

North Carolina State University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2019

Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2, 2022

We have found that giving top-performing students in CS1 courses personalized feedback increases ... more We have found that giving top-performing students in CS1 courses personalized feedback increases their intentions to persist in computing, especially among students who are women. This personalized feedback also appears to improve students' course experience and increases the likelihood that women apply to be CS1 TAs. Yet despite these benefits, giving personalized feedback may seem too impractical and time-intensive for faculty members to adopt in their own classrooms. In this workshop, we will reduce the burden of giving students personalized feedback by: 1) giving instructors empirically validated email templates to use in their own courses, and 2) guiding faculty how to send emails at-scale. We will also discuss how self-assessments influence students' career choices, how gender stereotypes bias self-assessments, and what faculty can do to counteract biased self-assessments of computing ability.

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

Test smells are commonly perceived as having a negative impact on software maintainability and co... more Test smells are commonly perceived as having a negative impact on software maintainability and correctness. Research has shown that Assertion Roulette is the most pervasive smell in industrial and open-source systems. However, some recent studies argue that the impact of Assertion Roulette is not as severe as previously believed, and developers usually consider it acceptable. The controversy over the impact of Assertion Roulette also exists in the area of testing education. To assess the impact of Assertion Roulette, we conducted a controlled empirical study with 42 CS students. We recruited participants from two populations, CS1 and a graduate testing course, to see what role experience may have in terms of this test smell's impact. Participants were tasked with implementing a project in Java that passes provided JUnit tests. Through analysis of student-authored source code, we measured the impact of Assertion Roulette using code quality measures and testing behavior measures. Our findings show that the impact of Assertion Roulette on students in this study was minimal. Though students with exposure to the test smell began testing significantly later, they performed similarly in terms of programming quality measures. Thus, it would seem the Assertion Roulette smell is no longer a smell at all, even for less experienced populations like students.

Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1

Research has shown that high self-assessment of ability, sense of belonging, and professional rol... more Research has shown that high self-assessment of ability, sense of belonging, and professional role confidence are crucial for students' persistence in computing. As grades in introductory computer science courses tend to be lower than other courses, it is essential to provide students with contextualized feedback about their performance in these courses. Giving students unambiguous and contextualized feedback is especially important during COVID when many classes have moved online and instructors and students have fewer opportunities to interact. In this study, we investigate the effect of a lightweight, scalable intervention where students received personalized, contextualized feedback from their instructors after two major assignments during the semester. After each intervention, we collected survey data to assess students' self-assessment of computing ability, sense of belonging, intentions to persist in computing, professional role confidence, and the likelihood of stating intention to pursue a major in computer science. To analyze the effectiveness of our intervention, we conducted linear regression and mediation analysis on student survey responses. Our results have shown that providing students with personalized feedback can significantly improve their self-assessment of computing ability, which will significantly improve their intentions to persist in computing. Furthermore, our results have demonstrated that our intervention can significantly improve students' sense of belonging, professional role confidence, and the likelihood of stating an intention to pursue a major in computer science. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Women; CS1.

Supplemental material, Online_Supplement for Who Wants to Lead? Anticipated Gender Discrimination... more Supplemental material, Online_Supplement for Who Wants to Lead? Anticipated Gender Discrimination Reduces Women's Leadership Ambitions by Susan R. Fisk and Jon Overton in Social Psychology Quarterly

Advancing Leadership and Organizations, 2016

for additional information. Recommended Citation Fisk, S. (2016). Who's on top: Can gender differ... more for additional information. Recommended Citation Fisk, S. (2016). Who's on top: Can gender differences in risk-taking lead to gendered hierarchies?. Paper presented at Closing the Gender Gap: Advancing Leadership and Organizations.

Sociology Compass, 2017

We conduct an extensive review of the literature on testosterone and economic risk-taking behavio... more We conduct an extensive review of the literature on testosterone and economic risk-taking behavior. In sum, there is evidence of a positive association between testosterone and economic risk taking, although it is unlikely to be a strong association given the abundance of null results. However, we argue that the existing literature may overstate the causal effects of testosterone on economic risk taking (or even report a spurious correlation) because this research has not considered the potentially confounding role of social status. Status could concurrently influence both testosterone and economic risk taking, given that testosterone is a social hormone with a reciprocal relationship with social status, and social status has been found to drive risk-taking behavior. We also argue against using findings from this literature to make gender essentialist claims, primarily because social phenomena influence the size—and existence—of gender differences in economic risk-taking behavior. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

Advances in Group Processes, 2016

Social implications Gender differences in risk-taking behavior likely depress the upward mobility... more Social implications Gender differences in risk-taking behavior likely depress the upward mobility of women and are a contributing factor to the dearth of women in top positions. In this era of falling formal barriers and women’s educational gains, gender differences in risk-taking behavior are likely of increasing importance for understanding the inequalities in hierarchies in U.S. society.

2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2020

Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1, 2021

Gender stereotypes about women's computing ability contribute to the dearth of women in compu... more Gender stereotypes about women's computing ability contribute to the dearth of women in computing by causing women to experience gender bias. These gender stereotypes are doubly disadvantaging to women because they create gender differences in self-assessments of computing ability, decreasing the likelihood that women will persist in Computer Science (CS). This is because students need to believe they have sufficient ability in a field in order to pursue it as a career. Building on decades of Sociological theory, we hypothesized that increasing top-performing women's self-assessments of computing ability would increase those women's intentions to persist in computing. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment in a CS1 class in which the top 50% of students were given additional performance feedback from their instructor via email. The intervention increased these women's and men's self-assessed CS ability but only increased the women's CS persi...

Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research

Prior work suggests that novice programmers are greatly impacted by the feedback provided by thei... more Prior work suggests that novice programmers are greatly impacted by the feedback provided by their programming environments. While some research has examined the impact of feedback on student learning in programming, there is no work (to our knowledge) that examines the impact of adaptive immediate feedback within programming environments on students' desire to persist in computer science (CS). In this paper, we integrate an adaptive immediate feedback (AIF) system into a block-based programming environment. Our AIF system is novel because it provides personalized positive and corrective feedback to students in real time as they work. In a controlled pilot study with novice high-school programmers, we show that our AIF system significantly increased students' intentions to persist in CS, and that students using AIF had greater engagement (as measured by their lower idle time) compared to students in the control condition. Further, we found evidence that the AIF system may improve student learning, as measured by student performance in a subsequent task without AIF. In interviews, students found the system fun and helpful, and reported feeling more focused and engaged. We hope this paper spurs more research on adaptive immediate feedback and the impact of programming environments on students' intentions to persist in CS.

Handbook of the Sociology of Gender

Metacognition and Learning

Social Psychology Quarterly

Research shows that men are more likely to take risks than women, but there is scant evidence tha... more Research shows that men are more likely to take risks than women, but there is scant evidence that this produces gender inequality. To address this gap, I analyzed engineering exam scores that used an unusual grading procedure. I found small average gender differences in risk-taking that did not produce gendered outcomes for students of average or poor ability. But the gender gap in risk-taking among the most competent students reduced the odds that high-ability women received top exam scores. These results demonstrate that gender differences in risk-taking can produce gender inequality in outcomes among top performers. This suggests that the upward mobility of high-ability women may be depressed relative to equally competent men in male-typed institutional settings in which outcomes are influenced by both ability and risk-taking. In this manner, these results provide new insights into the microlevel social-psychological processes that produce and reproduce gender inequality.

Social Psychology Quarterly

We examine whether anticipated gender discrimination—specifically, gendered sanctions for leaders... more We examine whether anticipated gender discrimination—specifically, gendered sanctions for leadership failure—decreases women’s leadership ambitions. We find that laypeople expect that women leaders will be punished more harshly for failure than otherwise similar men. We also compare the leadership ambitions of women and men under conditions of benign and costly failure and find that leadership roles with costly failure—which implicitly have the potential for gendered sanctions for failure—disproportionally depress women’s leadership ambitions relative to men’s. Anticipated sanctions for failure mediate this effect, providing evidence that anticipated gender discrimination reduces women’s leadership ambitions. These results illuminate microlevel foundations of the stalled revolution by demonstrating how gendered beliefs about leadership are recreated, legitimized, and contribute to the dearth of women leaders. These findings also suggest that organizational responses to failure may p...

PLOS ONE

Risk-takers are rhetorically extolled in America, but does this veneration ignore the downsides o... more Risk-takers are rhetorically extolled in America, but does this veneration ignore the downsides of failure? We test competing perspectives on how workplace risk-takers are perceived by examining cultural attitudes about individuals who successfully take, unsuccessful take, and avoid risks at work. The results of two experiments show that, in comparison to risk-avoidance, expected workplace outcomes are enhanced by successful risktaking and that failure does not appear to significantly harm expected workplace outcomes for risk-takers. While one experiment finds that failed risk-takers are seen as more likely to be downsized (because they are viewed as more foolish), we also find failed risk-takers are perceived as more likely to be hired and promoted. Mediation analyses reveal this is primarily because risk-taking-regardless of outcome-considerably increases perceptions of agency and decreases perceptions of indecisiveness, and these attributions predict positive workplace outcomes. We also find the results to be remarkably similar across varying participant characteristics (namely, gender, race, education level, work experience, income, and age), which suggests that there is a broad cultural consensus in the U.S. about the value of risk-taking. In sum, we find evidence that observers generally make more positive attributions about risk-takers than about risk-avoiders, even when risk-takers fail.

Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1

A key goal of many computer science education efforts is to increase the number and diversity of ... more A key goal of many computer science education efforts is to increase the number and diversity of students who persist in the field of computer science and into computing careers. Many interventions have been developed in computer science designed to increase students' persistence in computing. However, it is often difficult to measure the efficacy of such interventions, as measuring actual persistence by tracking student enrollments and career placements after an intervention is difficult and time-consuming, and sometimes even impossible. In the social sciences, attitudinal research is often used to solve this problem, as attitudes can be collected in survey form around the same time that interventions are introduced and are predictive of behavior. This can allow researchers to assess the potential efficacy of an intervention before devoting the time and energy to conduct a longitudinal analysis. In this paper, we develop and validate a scale to measure intentions to persist in computing, and demonstrate its use in predicting actual persistence as defined by enrolling in another computer science course within two semesters. We conduct two analyses to do this: First, we develop a computing persistence index and test whether our scale has high alpha reliability and whether our scale predicts actual persistence in computing using students' course enrollments. Second, we conduct analyses to reduce the number of items in the scale, to make the scale easy for others to include in their own research. This paper contributes to research on computing education by developing and validating a novel measure of intentions to persist in computing, which can be used by computer science educators to evaluate potential interventions. This paper also creates a short version of the index, to ease implementation.

Social Psychology Quarterly

This article presents results from an experimental study of workers tasked with evaluating profes... more This article presents results from an experimental study of workers tasked with evaluating professionals with identical workplace performances who differed with respect to hours worked and gender, isolating two mechanisms through which overwork leads to workplace inequality. Evaluators allocated greater organizational rewards to overworkers and perceived overworkers more favorably compared to full-time workers who performed similarly in less time, a practice that disproportionately rewards men over equivalently performing, more efficient women. Additionally, the magnitude of the overwork premium is greater for men than for women. We then use path analyses to explore the processes by which evaluators make assumptions about worker characteristics. We find overwork leads to greater organizational rewards primarily because employees who overwork are perceived as more committed—and, to a lesser extent, more competent—than full-time workers, although women’s overwork does not signal commi...

Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1

Are women less likely to persist in computer science because of gender differences in self-assess... more Are women less likely to persist in computer science because of gender differences in self-assessed computing ability? And why do gender differences exist in self-assessments among women and men who earn the same grades? We use a mixed-method research design to answer these questions, utilizing both quantitative survey data (n = 764) and qualitative interview data (n = 59) from students in introductory computing courses at a large U.S. state university. Quantitatively, we find that women self-assess their computing ability significantly lower than men who earn the same grades, and that these lower self-assessments reduce the likelihood that women enroll in future CS courses (relative to men who earn equivalent grades). Qualitatively, we explore how women and men perceive their own computing ability to understand why women self-assess their ability lower than men. Our interviews revealed that women were much less likely than men to make favorable comparative judgements about their ability relative to their classmates. Women also had higher personal performance standards than men. Lastly, women were more likely than men to experience disrespectful treatment, with an undertone of presumed incompetence, from their TAs and classmates. In sum, this research furthers our understanding of why gender differences exist in self-assessments of computing ability and how these differences can contribute to gender disparities in computing persistence. It also draws attention to the importance of

North Carolina State University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2019

Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2, 2022

We have found that giving top-performing students in CS1 courses personalized feedback increases ... more We have found that giving top-performing students in CS1 courses personalized feedback increases their intentions to persist in computing, especially among students who are women. This personalized feedback also appears to improve students' course experience and increases the likelihood that women apply to be CS1 TAs. Yet despite these benefits, giving personalized feedback may seem too impractical and time-intensive for faculty members to adopt in their own classrooms. In this workshop, we will reduce the burden of giving students personalized feedback by: 1) giving instructors empirically validated email templates to use in their own courses, and 2) guiding faculty how to send emails at-scale. We will also discuss how self-assessments influence students' career choices, how gender stereotypes bias self-assessments, and what faculty can do to counteract biased self-assessments of computing ability.

2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)

Test smells are commonly perceived as having a negative impact on software maintainability and co... more Test smells are commonly perceived as having a negative impact on software maintainability and correctness. Research has shown that Assertion Roulette is the most pervasive smell in industrial and open-source systems. However, some recent studies argue that the impact of Assertion Roulette is not as severe as previously believed, and developers usually consider it acceptable. The controversy over the impact of Assertion Roulette also exists in the area of testing education. To assess the impact of Assertion Roulette, we conducted a controlled empirical study with 42 CS students. We recruited participants from two populations, CS1 and a graduate testing course, to see what role experience may have in terms of this test smell's impact. Participants were tasked with implementing a project in Java that passes provided JUnit tests. Through analysis of student-authored source code, we measured the impact of Assertion Roulette using code quality measures and testing behavior measures. Our findings show that the impact of Assertion Roulette on students in this study was minimal. Though students with exposure to the test smell began testing significantly later, they performed similarly in terms of programming quality measures. Thus, it would seem the Assertion Roulette smell is no longer a smell at all, even for less experienced populations like students.

Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 1

Research has shown that high self-assessment of ability, sense of belonging, and professional rol... more Research has shown that high self-assessment of ability, sense of belonging, and professional role confidence are crucial for students' persistence in computing. As grades in introductory computer science courses tend to be lower than other courses, it is essential to provide students with contextualized feedback about their performance in these courses. Giving students unambiguous and contextualized feedback is especially important during COVID when many classes have moved online and instructors and students have fewer opportunities to interact. In this study, we investigate the effect of a lightweight, scalable intervention where students received personalized, contextualized feedback from their instructors after two major assignments during the semester. After each intervention, we collected survey data to assess students' self-assessment of computing ability, sense of belonging, intentions to persist in computing, professional role confidence, and the likelihood of stating intention to pursue a major in computer science. To analyze the effectiveness of our intervention, we conducted linear regression and mediation analysis on student survey responses. Our results have shown that providing students with personalized feedback can significantly improve their self-assessment of computing ability, which will significantly improve their intentions to persist in computing. Furthermore, our results have demonstrated that our intervention can significantly improve students' sense of belonging, professional role confidence, and the likelihood of stating an intention to pursue a major in computer science. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Women; CS1.

Supplemental material, Online_Supplement for Who Wants to Lead? Anticipated Gender Discrimination... more Supplemental material, Online_Supplement for Who Wants to Lead? Anticipated Gender Discrimination Reduces Women's Leadership Ambitions by Susan R. Fisk and Jon Overton in Social Psychology Quarterly

Advancing Leadership and Organizations, 2016

for additional information. Recommended Citation Fisk, S. (2016). Who's on top: Can gender differ... more for additional information. Recommended Citation Fisk, S. (2016). Who's on top: Can gender differences in risk-taking lead to gendered hierarchies?. Paper presented at Closing the Gender Gap: Advancing Leadership and Organizations.

Sociology Compass, 2017

We conduct an extensive review of the literature on testosterone and economic risk-taking behavio... more We conduct an extensive review of the literature on testosterone and economic risk-taking behavior. In sum, there is evidence of a positive association between testosterone and economic risk taking, although it is unlikely to be a strong association given the abundance of null results. However, we argue that the existing literature may overstate the causal effects of testosterone on economic risk taking (or even report a spurious correlation) because this research has not considered the potentially confounding role of social status. Status could concurrently influence both testosterone and economic risk taking, given that testosterone is a social hormone with a reciprocal relationship with social status, and social status has been found to drive risk-taking behavior. We also argue against using findings from this literature to make gender essentialist claims, primarily because social phenomena influence the size—and existence—of gender differences in economic risk-taking behavior. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

Advances in Group Processes, 2016

Social implications Gender differences in risk-taking behavior likely depress the upward mobility... more Social implications Gender differences in risk-taking behavior likely depress the upward mobility of women and are a contributing factor to the dearth of women in top positions. In this era of falling formal barriers and women’s educational gains, gender differences in risk-taking behavior are likely of increasing importance for understanding the inequalities in hierarchies in U.S. society.

2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2020

Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1, 2021

Gender stereotypes about women's computing ability contribute to the dearth of women in compu... more Gender stereotypes about women's computing ability contribute to the dearth of women in computing by causing women to experience gender bias. These gender stereotypes are doubly disadvantaging to women because they create gender differences in self-assessments of computing ability, decreasing the likelihood that women will persist in Computer Science (CS). This is because students need to believe they have sufficient ability in a field in order to pursue it as a career. Building on decades of Sociological theory, we hypothesized that increasing top-performing women's self-assessments of computing ability would increase those women's intentions to persist in computing. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment in a CS1 class in which the top 50% of students were given additional performance feedback from their instructor via email. The intervention increased these women's and men's self-assessed CS ability but only increased the women's CS persi...

Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research

Prior work suggests that novice programmers are greatly impacted by the feedback provided by thei... more Prior work suggests that novice programmers are greatly impacted by the feedback provided by their programming environments. While some research has examined the impact of feedback on student learning in programming, there is no work (to our knowledge) that examines the impact of adaptive immediate feedback within programming environments on students' desire to persist in computer science (CS). In this paper, we integrate an adaptive immediate feedback (AIF) system into a block-based programming environment. Our AIF system is novel because it provides personalized positive and corrective feedback to students in real time as they work. In a controlled pilot study with novice high-school programmers, we show that our AIF system significantly increased students' intentions to persist in CS, and that students using AIF had greater engagement (as measured by their lower idle time) compared to students in the control condition. Further, we found evidence that the AIF system may improve student learning, as measured by student performance in a subsequent task without AIF. In interviews, students found the system fun and helpful, and reported feeling more focused and engaged. We hope this paper spurs more research on adaptive immediate feedback and the impact of programming environments on students' intentions to persist in CS.

Handbook of the Sociology of Gender

Metacognition and Learning

Social Psychology Quarterly

Research shows that men are more likely to take risks than women, but there is scant evidence tha... more Research shows that men are more likely to take risks than women, but there is scant evidence that this produces gender inequality. To address this gap, I analyzed engineering exam scores that used an unusual grading procedure. I found small average gender differences in risk-taking that did not produce gendered outcomes for students of average or poor ability. But the gender gap in risk-taking among the most competent students reduced the odds that high-ability women received top exam scores. These results demonstrate that gender differences in risk-taking can produce gender inequality in outcomes among top performers. This suggests that the upward mobility of high-ability women may be depressed relative to equally competent men in male-typed institutional settings in which outcomes are influenced by both ability and risk-taking. In this manner, these results provide new insights into the microlevel social-psychological processes that produce and reproduce gender inequality.

Social Psychology Quarterly

We examine whether anticipated gender discrimination—specifically, gendered sanctions for leaders... more We examine whether anticipated gender discrimination—specifically, gendered sanctions for leadership failure—decreases women’s leadership ambitions. We find that laypeople expect that women leaders will be punished more harshly for failure than otherwise similar men. We also compare the leadership ambitions of women and men under conditions of benign and costly failure and find that leadership roles with costly failure—which implicitly have the potential for gendered sanctions for failure—disproportionally depress women’s leadership ambitions relative to men’s. Anticipated sanctions for failure mediate this effect, providing evidence that anticipated gender discrimination reduces women’s leadership ambitions. These results illuminate microlevel foundations of the stalled revolution by demonstrating how gendered beliefs about leadership are recreated, legitimized, and contribute to the dearth of women leaders. These findings also suggest that organizational responses to failure may p...

PLOS ONE

Risk-takers are rhetorically extolled in America, but does this veneration ignore the downsides o... more Risk-takers are rhetorically extolled in America, but does this veneration ignore the downsides of failure? We test competing perspectives on how workplace risk-takers are perceived by examining cultural attitudes about individuals who successfully take, unsuccessful take, and avoid risks at work. The results of two experiments show that, in comparison to risk-avoidance, expected workplace outcomes are enhanced by successful risktaking and that failure does not appear to significantly harm expected workplace outcomes for risk-takers. While one experiment finds that failed risk-takers are seen as more likely to be downsized (because they are viewed as more foolish), we also find failed risk-takers are perceived as more likely to be hired and promoted. Mediation analyses reveal this is primarily because risk-taking-regardless of outcome-considerably increases perceptions of agency and decreases perceptions of indecisiveness, and these attributions predict positive workplace outcomes. We also find the results to be remarkably similar across varying participant characteristics (namely, gender, race, education level, work experience, income, and age), which suggests that there is a broad cultural consensus in the U.S. about the value of risk-taking. In sum, we find evidence that observers generally make more positive attributions about risk-takers than about risk-avoiders, even when risk-takers fail.