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This study considered the use of video conferencing virtual backgrounds with employees located in a large multinational corporate organisation in Ireland and the USA to discern if background images evoking gendered stereotypes of leadership can cue stereotype threat in female technology workers undertaking a leadership activity, thus negatively effecting performance. This study aims to contribute to the body of research on stereotype threat by establishing whether virtual backgrounds used in video conferencing software are inherently identity safe or whether their use could have a negative performance impact on marginalised groups.

Using a mixed methods research design with 22 participants in two countries working in the one large organisation, using two quantitative methods (an experiment and a survey) and one qualitative method (semi-structured interviews), the study examined the relationship between performance on the leadership activity and exposure to gendered backgrounds on a video conference call.

It found that female leaders undertaking a leadership test experienced more anxiety and achieved lower scores on average when exposed to a male-gendered virtual background compared to male colleagues or female leaders exposed to a female gendered background. It was also found that these leaders were aware of the stereotype of leadership being White and male, and showed symptoms of prolonged exposure to stereotype threat in the workplace. While the authors still are working through a post-pandemic environment, it may be judicious for organisations to restrict the use of virtual backgrounds to identity-safe ones, specifically chosen by the company.

The study makes several practical recommendations, indicating actions which can be taken at the individual, team and corporate levels. Re-running this experiment in a more controlled environment with a larger sample set could yield more definitive, statistically significant results and contribute more to the literature.

Some individual impacts were found via the interviews. Male leaders in the organisation need to do more to mentor and endorse their female colleagues. By doing this, they can counter the negative effects of solo status and the subsequent performance degradations of their female counterparts, while also setting an example for other leaders. Participation in the mentoring programme and initiatives such as Dare and value, inclusion, belonging, and equity should be encouraged and supported. Reverse mentoring should also be encouraged among the population of male leaders to aid in allyship and bias-awareness.

Teams should note that a democratic vote is not always the best way to decide on the names of teams, projects or meeting rooms. These may skew towards niche interests that can serve to alienate members of the team who do not associate themselves with that interest. Rather, the teams should strive to be fully inclusive and educated on the need for identity-safety. Team events may also serve to alienate members if teams are not mindful of the need to be inclusive. Activities, such as “go-kart” racing and physical or competitive team events have been highlighted as unsuitable for some team members, and should be avoided in favour of inclusivity.

A significant body of research has documented the effect to which stereotype threat can be triggered by both the physical environment and by the use of various technology media. However, there is a dearth of research exploring the relationship between stereotype threat, defined as “the concrete, real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one’s group applies” (Steele et al., 2002, p. 385), and video conferencing software features, such as virtual backgrounds.

Although situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) is centered on rationality and cognitive information processing, it ignores that people are also driven by irrationality and non-cognitive information processing. The purpose of this study aims to fill this gap by examining how gender stereotypes, based on perceived spokesperson sex influence the public’s perceptions of crisis response messages.

A 2 (industry type: automotive vs daycare industry) × 2 (spokesperson’s sex: male vs female) × 2 (crisis response appeal: rational vs emotional) between-subject online experiment was conducted to examine the effect of gender stereotype in crisis communication.

Results showed that either matching spokesperson sex with sex differed industry or matching sex differed industry with appropriate crisis response appeal can generate a more positive evaluation of the spokesperson and the organization. The results also revealed under which circumstances, the attractiveness of different sex of the spokesperson can either promote or mitigate people’s perceptions of the organization. Furthermore, when people are aware of a spokesperson’s sex, in a female-associated industry, a mismatching effect of a positive violation of a male-related stereotype overrides a matching effect of a female-related stereotype in crisis communication.

This study is among the first to identify how the gender of a spokesperson and industry type affect publics’ crisis response.

This paper aims to examine how a stereotype threat, which entails being aware of a negative stereotype about one’s social group (e.g. gender), affects consumers’ price perceptions.

The authors conducted four studies to examine the effect of a stereotype threat on consumers’ perceptions of a product’s price–quality relationship.

This study found that being aware of a negative stereotype about one’s social group (i.e. gender here) led consumers to use price more as a quality indicator. This study also determined that reappraisal – an alternative way of coping with stereotype threats – reduced the impact of a stereotype threat and, subsequently, decreased reliance on price to infer quality.

This research contributes to the consumer decision-making literature by examining stereotype threat effect in in-store product purchasing contexts; provides theoretical contributions to the processing of price information by exploring the role of a stereotype threat in price perceptions and revealing that impairment of consumers’ working memory resources affects price perceptions; adds to the existing stereotype threat literature by investigating the effect of a stereotype threat on systematic versus heuristic information processing; and advances the stress and coping literature by suggesting that consumers adopting a reappraisal strategy cope better with a stereotype threat than when opting for a suppression strategy.

This research provides important implications for consumers. For example, the findings suggest that consumers who would like to avoid paying more for stereotype-associated products may adopt reappraisal to cope with a stereotype threat. Reappraisal may allow consumers to use fewer cognitive resources when coping with stereotype threats, thus minimizing the possibility that they might overpay for high-priced products.

This research uniquely examines the effect of a stereotype threat on consumers’ price perceptions and the role of reappraisal in this effect.

Diversity in entrepreneurship has become a noteworthy topic of research since consistent differences – and few similarities, if any – exist among entrepreneurial profiles. The present paper aims to compare different entrepreneurial profiles managing innovation processes in new technology-based firms (NTBFs). In particular, attention is focussed on young entrepreneurs who are in a critical phase of their lifelong learning, the school-to-work transition.

Statistical elaborations are based on data retrieved from Italian Ministry of Economic Development in January 2021 and carried out through stochastic frontier analyses. Respectively, 1,699 young entrepreneurs, 1,079 female entrepreneurs, 205 ethnic entrepreneurs and 8,224 stereotyped entrepreneurs are considered.

Factors affecting the performance of innovation processes managed in NTBFs are the same for stereotyped and female entrepreneurs, but they consistently differ for young and ethnic entrepreneurs. Achieved results are not in the position to offer a complete analysis of the phenomenon but – hopefully – can corroborate a very interesting and up-to-date research path that merits further development. In particular, young entrepreneurs disclose an unexpected skills mismatch that should be investigated in-depth.

Most contributions offer a narrow view of entrepreneurial profiles since they focus on one profile per time. The present paper, instead, considers four entrepreneurial profiles and compares them. Moreover, young entrepreneurs reveal an unexpected skills mismatch that underlines the relevance of specific activities of on-the-job training and apprenticeships in order to try to overcome it and improve the results achievable by young entrepreneurs.

Given the recent emergence of China as a dominant economy and internal changes that have led to the encouragement of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial initiatives, this paper explores whether family dynamics and relationships still play an important role in women's decision to become entrepreneurs. It aims to understand whether there has been a shift in family dynamics and decision-making that supports female entrepreneurship.

Given that the purpose of the study is to understand the role of relationships and family dynamics in their career choice, this study has taken a qualitative approach and carried out interviews with fifteen Chinese female entrepreneurs to understand the role of relationships and family dynamics in their career choice.

The results note that though there are changes in family dynamics that encourage female entrepreneurship, women still find it difficult to choose entrepreneurship as a career and there are unfair expectations that are placed on them. The expectations create undue stress which directly affects their ability to carry out their professional duties. The research suggests that to foster the development of female entrepreneurship, government agencies and local government bodies should provide further access to family support services that can facilitate women's empowerment and foster entrepreneurial thinking without feeling guilty about family commitments or unfair expectations.

Recent studies on women's entrepreneurship have focused on various facets. The role of family dynamics and relationships has long been studied in the context of female entrepreneurship. In emerging economies like China, family dynamics and relationships determine whether women can choose entrepreneurship as a career choice or not. However, there is very limited research on the topic, in the geographical context of China. Hence, this paper is among pioneer research addressing family dynamics in the female entrepreneurship debate in China.

This study aims to explore the impact of women empowerment and gender-stereotypical advertising exposure on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intents.

The quantitative research approach was used to assess the women-empowerment and gender-stereotypical advertising on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions, explicating the most effective approach in marketing communication in the Arab context, specifically Egypt. Administrated questionnaires were distributed online cross-gender through the use of convenience sampling. The targeted average sample size sought was minimum of 370. Once the data was acquired, partial least square path modelling of structural equation modelling was conducted to test the hypotheses.

Results show that male consumers and female consumers react to a certain extent differently to women-empowerment and gender-stereotypical advertisings. For instance, gender-stereotypical advertisings effect attitude for both genders; it effects male consumers’ purchase intentions, but not female consumers. Women empowerment advertising is insignificant on brand attitude and purchase intention among male consumers; among female consumers, it has significant impact on brand attitude, but not purchase intention. Nevertheless, both categories of advertising contribute to male consumers’ and female consumers’ perception and attitude towards gender role portrayal.

This study provides noteworthy insights and perspectives on women-empowerment (Femvertising) and gender-stereotypical advertising effects on cross-gender consumers in the Arab region (a region of strong masculine culture values). The emerged conclusions aid as a reference and guide for scholars and practitioners to develop effective advertising that create prospect depictions and build inspired female customer base.

While the economic literature mostly tackled discrimination looking at labour costs, this work focuses on its relation to labour productivity, arguing that discrimination may worsen the performance of female employees. In this view, it represents a source of allocative inefficiency, which contributes to reducing output.

Female discrimination is both a social and an economic problem. In social terms, consolidated gender stereotypes impose constraints on women’s behaviour, worsening their overall well-being. In economic terms, women face generally worse labour market conditions. Using long-run Italian data spanning from 1861 to 2009, the authors propose a novel measure of female discrimination based on the observed frequency of discriminating epithets. Following social capital theory, the authors distinguish between structural and voluntary discrimination, and use Data Envelopment Analysis for time series data to assess the extent of inefficiency that each component of discrimination induces in the production process.

The results draw the trajectory of female discrimination in Italy and provide evidence in favour of the idea that female discrimination reduces productive efficiency. In particular, the structural component of female discrimination, although less sizeable than the voluntary component, plays a major role, especially in recent years, where more stringent beauty standards fuel looks-based discrimination.

The contribution of this work is twofold. First, based on contributions from social sciences different from economics, it proposes a novel theoretical framework that explores the effect of discriminatory language on labour productivity. Second, it introduces a novel and direct measure of female discrimination at the country level, based on the bidirectional link between language and culture. The indicator is easily understood by policymakers and may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies.

Scholars have acknowledged gender-role ideology as a central factor in flirting style. This study aims to exam the combined effect of flirting type and flirter's sex on positive and adverse customer reactions.

In Study 1, participants (N = 555) were divided into four scenario conditions in a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design: server sex (male vs female) and flirting type (authentic vs fake). Study 1 scenarios explored positive customer outcomes (i.e. loyalty and tip size). Study 2 applied the same research design, presenting participants (N = 404) scenarios relating to negative outcomes (i.e. anger and sense of threat).

The findings revealed that the flirter’s sex significantly moderated the relationship between flirting type and customers’ (the targets’) reactions.

This research offers three primary contributions. First, it elaborates on the dynamics of flirting in service settings (i.e. face-to-face interactions between the service provider and customer). Second, as the effects of flirting on its targets have been reported as equivocal (perceived as pleasing and flattering or, in contrast, annoying, deceptive and misleading), this study explores its positive and negative customer-related outcomes. Third, the study seeks to better understand the impact of a flirting service employee’s sex on customers’ outcomes.