Study Finds That Support for Women’s Creativity Faces a Glass Ceiling in the Workplace

A new study conducted at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has found men receive greater support for creativity in the workplace than women. Researchers surveyed more than 14,000 workers in a variety of industries across the United States.

The results showed that men report greater support for creativity in the workplace than women, and greater support for workplace creativity leads to more frequent creative workplace behaviors. Those who receive greater support for their creativity become more likely to innovate on the job.

The proportion of women employed in an industry influences this relationship, such that differences between men and women become smaller as the proportion of women in an industry increases.

Writing in Psychology Today, co-author of the journal study Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, a research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, stated that “women make up 47 percent of the U.S. workforce. Yet they are not likely to receive equal support for creativity, support that is crucial to enable creativity and innovation at work. This bias could hurt organizations by preventing them from fully utilizing the human potential of all their employees. And it could hurt women who are not equally respected today or encouraged to develop their creative potential, which will likely be increasingly important for attaining job security and advancing in their jobs in the future.”

Dr. Pringle is a graduate of the University of Zagreb in Croatia, where she majored in psychology. She earned a Ph.D. in personality/social psychology at the University of New Hampshire.

The full study, “Gender and Support for Creativity at Work, was published on the website of journal Creativity and Innovation Management. It may be accessed here.