Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Helping Or Hurting?: Understanding Women’S Perceptions Of Male Allies, Shannon K. Cheng, Linnea C. Ng, Allison M. Traylor, Eden B. King

Personnel Assessment and Decisions

In the past decade, organizational scholars have begun to explore the role of allies in mitigating workplace discrimination toward women and members of minority groups. However, this nascent literature has, to this point, failed to consider the perspective of targets of ally behavior. That is, we do not yet know how targets of discrimination experience others’ intervention or advocacy. To begin to understand these issues, we examine target perceptions of allyship through a qualitative critical incident approach, asking women to describe experiences in which a man has effectively and ineffectively acted as an ally to them in the workplace. Our …