Gender bias in advice taking and decision making during the idea generation stage of an innovation process

Abstract

Innovation remains important to ensure a company’s future relevance, and with it comes an interesting yet often difficult process. An innovation process is an uncertain activity, so having a good decision making process is key. A good decision making process can increase the accuracy, but also the quality of a decision. Yet, decisions are rarely made in isolation. Often, a decision maker depends on advice to sharpen their judgement. If and how this advice is even used by the decision maker, relies upon several elements that may influence the outcome of a decision. Amongst these elements is gender bias. In this research we questioned whether gender has an influence on decision making and advice taking. We conducted an experiment where we aimed to find out if the advice given by women is discounted more than advice given by men. the results of this research generally show that the endorsements given by women are not more discounted than the endorsements given by the men. This allows us to reject our hypothesis. For idea selection, the participants were more inclined to give more weight to endorsements given by women than endorsements given by men. The same observation was made for the ranking of the ideas. Ideas that did receive female endorsements had a higher likelihood ending up being ranked higher in the top 5 than ideas that received male endorsements. We can conclude that for our experiment, the participants did not give less weight or importance to advice given by women.