Vivian L. Xiao, Ph.D.

Vivian’s work explores how race and gender interact to impact a wide range of social and organizational outcomes, including leader evaluation and selection, politics, and gender-norm formation.

 

In one line of work, she investigates how perceivers’ and targets’ racial group memberships impact gender perception and the formation and enforcement of gender norms. Her work finds that people largely construct and enforce gender and gender norms within racial groups. Responses to gender-norm violation and gender-norm conformity alike are most pronounced within racial groups, which may reflect a fundamental association people have between gender and racial in-group members. Her work suggests that who we see and engage with as “men” and “women” are largely racial in-group members.

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In a second line of work, she focuses on how workers with minoritized identities engage with their work and their organizations. She is interested in how workers from different racial groups may engage in different workplace behaviors that are more or less rewarded in the American organizational context and the implications these behaviors have for career outcomes, as well as how remote work may change the amount and degree of discrimination that racial minority workers perceive and how this affects wellbeing and belonging in organizations.

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In a third line of work, she examines the micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors that influence diversity in the upper echelons of organizations. At the micro-level, she focuses on how gender and its intersection with age influence appearance-based double standards between men and women and outcomes such as compensation, firm performance, and media attention among Fortune 1500 CEOs. At the meso-level, she examines how the demographic composition and political ideology of corporate boards influence the selection of women CEOs, as well as organization-level downstream consequences, such as pay equity and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) outcomes. At the macro-level, she examines how societal-level factors such as mega-threats and diversity-related policies influence the nomination of women and racial minorities to boards, as well as the centrality and importance of their positions on boards.