Gender and Demographic Bias in Management Control Systems

Progress has been made in the last century toward reducing gender bias in society at large and in the workplace specifically. The negative impact gender differentiation has on women’s careers, however, is not gone. Differential treatment and biases have moved from explicit to more implicit. These biases are rooted in decades of modeling and stereotyping women as communal and men as agentic, thereby casting women as caregivers and men as leaders. The stereotyping influences women’s professional lives by tainting both supervisors’ and employees’ decisions. The differentiation starts already in hiring decisions, which include decisions on who to hire, at what rank, and how much to pay. Once women are hired, the bias continues in task allocation and performance evaluation, which determine immediate compensation and subsequent promotions. Thus, women’s career progressions are made more complicated throughout their entire participation in the workforce. The multifaceted nature of the problem suggests that only a holistic approach can significantly reduce gender bias.

For the full book chapter see: Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Impact of Gender Bias on Career Progression by Jasmijn C. Bol, Hila Fogel-Yaari :: SSRN

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), employees voluntarily going "above and beyond" their defined job responsibilities, is important for organizational success. We examine unintended consequences of using a management control system to promote and reward OCBs. Specifically, because OCB transcends pre-established core job performance criteria, valuation of OCB necessarily relies on subjective judgments, allowing for gender stereotypes to manifest. Using proprietary data from a financial services firm, we examine two types of OCBs, agentic OCB and communal OCB. Consistent with gender stereotypes, women are less likely to participate in agentic OCB and more likely to participate in communal OCB. Consistent with “shifting standards” theory, we find that men obtain a significant evaluation premium for communal OCB, while women obtain a marginal evaluation premium for agentic OCB. Our findings build upon research showing career benefits of OCB, on average, to show gender differences in the value organizations place on different types of OCB.

For the full book chapter see: Promoting Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB): Unintended Gender Disparities in the Participation and Evaluation of Different Types of OCB by Jasmijn C. Bol, Hila Fogel-Yaari, Isabella Grabner, Karen Sedatole :: SSRN

The historical value of the case lies in the way it connects accounting and organizational decisions to one of the most important civil rights stories in New Orleans. It centers on the courage of Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost, who desegregated McDonogh 19 in 1960 under extraordinary hostility and isolation, and it shows how that legacy is preserved through the TEP Center today. By tracing the transformation of the former school into a space for exhibits, guided tours, teacher programming, dialogue, and community engagement, the case makes clear that this history is not distant or symbolic. It remains alive in the institution’s mission and in its ongoing work in the Lower Ninth Ward.

The educational accounting value of the case is that it places core management accounting questions in a setting where the numbers genuinely matter. Students must evaluate common cost allocation choices, think carefully about appropriate cost drivers, analyze pricing and break-even decisions, design fundraising tiers, and assess whether postponing a major gala makes financial sense under uncertainty. At the same time, the case pushes them beyond calculation alone. It asks them to consider how accounting supports mission, accessibility, stewardship, and strategy in a nonprofit organization, and even invites reflection on the strengths and limitations of AI-generated accounting suggestions. That makes the case both technically rigorous and unusually meaningful in the classroom.