Gender and Opportunity in the Federal Bureaucracy

This article tests Rosabeth Kanter's hypotheses that (a) promotion opportunity in organizations is related to several adaptive attitudes and bahaviors, (b) women have less promotion opportunity, (c) women are more likely to display the adaptations, and (d) when opportunity is controlled these gender differences are eliminated, using data from 897 employees in six offices of a government agency. Low opportunity was moderately related to bitter dissatisfaction concerning the promotion system and weakly related as predicted to four of eight remaining measures of these adaptations. Although gender was strongly related to occupational level, the segregation of women in lower-level career ladders was accompanied by roghly equal promotion opportunities for both sexes within the career ladders in which they were concentrated. Gender was moderately related to desire for security and interpersonal support at work, but is was related only weakly to four of the remaining measures of adaptations and related to two of ...