Tokenism in Performance Evaluation: The Effects of Work Group Representation on Male-Female and White-Black Differences in Performance Ratings

Male-female differences in performance ratings were examined in 486 work groups across a wide variety of jobs and organizations. As suggested by the sex stereotyping literature, women received lower ratings when the proportion of women in the group was small, even after male-female cognitive ability, psychomotor ability, education, and experience differences were controlled. Replication of the analyses with racial differences (White-Black) in 814 work groups demonstrated that group composition had little effect on performance ratings. The effects of group composition on stereotyping behaviors do not appear to generalize to all minority contexts.