Strategies for Minimizing Gender Biases in the Workplace

Shelley Correll is the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is also a professor in the department of sociology at Stanford and an active member of the American Sociological Association. She has chaired several committees and panels dedicated to increasing faculty diversity at both Stanford and Cornell University. Her research seeks to uncover the social psychological processes that reproduce gender inequality.

In particular, she studies how gendered expectations shape the everyday experiences of women and men in work and educational settings, thereby reproducing existing patterns of gender inequality, such as the gender segregation of paid work or the wage penalty experienced by mothers. Throughout her work, she illuminates how gender inequality persists in the face of larger societal changes and suggests how organizations might intervene to reduce gender inequalities.
Correll is the author of the prize-winning "Getting a job: Is there a motherhood penalty?" This paper demonstrates how stereotypic beliefs associated with motherhood disadvantage mothers in terms of workplace evaluations, as well as pay and hiring decisions. (Read more about the motherhood penalty on Gender News.) Correll’s other publications include: "Gender and the career choice process: the role of biased self assessments"; "Biased estimators? Comparing status and statistical theories of gender discrimination"; ”The Social Psychology of Gender (Advances in Group Processes, Vol. 24). With several collaborators, she is currently writing a book on social science research methods. Correll's research has been covered by CNN, ABC World News Tonight, and The New York Times; her research has been referenced in employment discrimination cases, in the California State Senate, and in documents written by the EEOC to offer guidance to employers on caregiver discrimination. She consults with organizations to reduce gender biases in the workplace.

Correll received her PhD from Stanford University in 2001, where she was a Graduate Dissertation Fellow at the Clayman Institute, then the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. For more about Correll, read Shelley J. Correll to lead Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research in Gender News. As Director, Correll has set the theme, Beyond the Stalled Revolution, Reinvigorating Gender Equality in the Twenty-first Century.