Felice Klein, assistant professor in the Department of Management, is among the finalists for the 2022 Scholarly Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s Human Resources Division. The academy gives this award to faculty for research that had a significant impact on the human resources field in the previous year.
The recognition is for Klein’s 2021 paper, “The gender equity gap: A multistudy investigation of within-job inequality in equity-based awards,” published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The paper examines pay inequality between women and men in equity awards. Equity awards are options to purchase company stock as a reward for employee performance.
Klein and her co-authors studied information from two technology organizations, archival data from publicly traded firms and experimental data. They found that men were more likely to receive equity-based awards than women, even when they were doing similar jobs. This research revealed a new facet to the gendered pay gap and gave human resources divisions new tools for identifying and repairing gender inequality in compensation.