Events

Prof. Oliver Hahl
Associate Professor of Organization Theory, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University

Many organizations seek to increase the role of women, but how are these attempts received? Integrating gender discrimination and tokenism theories, we argue that women’s inclusion in key roles is often penalized. However, such penalties can diminish when the macrosocial environment legitimizes women’s inclusion, provided that such inclusion is genuine and substantive (i.e., non-tokenistic) rather than superficial or performative (i.e., tokenistic). We test these predictions in a panel dataset of movie series from 1991 to 2021. Results suggest that increasing women in principal roles (i.e., female increase) may hurt film evaluations. However, these penalties diminish when societal gender equality is high. Analogous patterns emerge at the state level: female increase movies receive greater audience interest in markets where genders are more equal. Crucially, evidence suggests that when gender equality is high, only non-tokenistic (vs. tokenistic) female increase is favored by the audience, measured variedly as films (a) passing (vs. failing) the Bechdel test, (b) featuring more than (vs. fewer than) two women in principal roles, or (c) casting female actors with high (vs. low) performance credentials. Text analyses of over 140,000 movie reviews reveal that female actors receive more positive attention from audience when genders are more equal and when their engagement is non-tokenistic. Lastly, we conduct a preregistered vignette-based experiment that allows us to directly identify the negative influence of tokenism concerns on film evaluations when gender equality is salient. Collectively, these results highlight the dual expectations that arise with gender equality: engaging women and doing so meaningfully.