Evening the Odds in a Gendered Workplace: The Empowering Role of Knowledge Repositories

As organizations strive to make workplaces more diverse and inclusive, it is essential to understand how various employee groups access and process information and how that impacts their performance and career outcomes. Against this backdrop, this study examines how knowledge repository affects female employees’ performance and promotion likelihood in a gendered workplace. The analysis of a large archival data set on repository accesses by employees of a large engineering firm first shows that accessing general knowledge from the repository on a just-in-time basis helps improve women’s performance. Further, we reveal that women’s comprehensive information processing approach is the underlying mechanism of why women can better utilize general knowledge in general documents to aid independent problem solving in the field, whereas men’s selective approach in information acquisition held an advantage in processing firm-specific knowledge in problem-solution documents that address specific problems. Second, we find that although women in this male-gendered domain face barrier to promotion, accessing more firm-specific knowledge from problem-solution documents increases their likelihood of being promoted within the firm, helping them mitigate some of the extant bias against women. Third, though the general knowledge that women accumulate from the repository does not help with promotion within the firm, it helps women find external opportunities for career advancement. Finally, the study reveals through survey data that women develop fewer problem-solving skills from calling for technical support compared with searching for information on their own, and such lack of skill development hurts women’s chances of getting promoted internally.