Q&A with Shani Pupco
As Shani Pupco assumes her new role as Assistant Professor, Management, at the Sprott School of Business, effective July 2024, we take the opportunity to talk with her about her excitement in joining the team, what the next few months will look like, as well as her research passions around leadership emergence within the world of Organizational Behaviour (OB).
Before we dive into your research areas, I noticed you received all three degrees from Queen’s University (Kingston, ON) where you started your academic journey in psychology. How did you find your way into the business world and OB?
I actually started out in the life sciences stream, and psychology classes were some of my electives. As the semester continued, I realized I was most excited about my psychology classes, so I eventually switched majors. Of course, I thought I’d do clinical psychology after school, as most do in this program. But it was during a psychometry class learning about the development of all these workplace scales that I became intrigued with taking everything I learned from psychology, and specifically social psychology (that’s what I found myself drawn to) and figuring out how it can be applied to people’s work lives.
At that time, I didn’t really know what OB was yet and thought it involved only helping people work better or more efficiently, so I needed to figure out how to turn it around to help people in the workplace.
I went to my undergraduate advisor in psychology, and she was the one who directed me to OB, which is in the business department. I reached out to Julian Barling. He was the one who really helped understand what OB is. He explained his research at the time—he was looking at how socioeconomic status influences people becoming leaders and the factors that can help or hinder them from becoming leaders. This was when the bell went off! It was so interesting, so I took my first OB course, and the rest is history!
What are the areas of research that you’re most interested in?
Broadly, my research aims to better understand who does and who doesn’t become a leader in organizations, and why. Specifically, I’m exploring the role of parenthood in leadership emergence. What we continue to see is an underrepresentation of women at the leadership level within organizations globally and I’m motivated to elucidate the reasons why. My goal would be that, through our research, we can one day reach a point of equality, free of discrimination, where there is true equal opportunity for all sexes and genders to ascend to leadership positions within organizations independent of parenthood status.
Why do you think women remain at a seemingly disadvantage and how are you exploring this in your research projects?
It’s hard to conclude that there is only one overarching reason women are underrepresented in leadership roles. We are, in fact, seeing an increase in women in leadership roles, but it is predominately in middle-management roles. When we explore the literature, we see all these nuances that explain what is working against women ascending equally to men. There are stereotypes (such as expectations around what women can do), parenthood, the perception that women don’t want to become leaders, as well as the division of the types of jobs that women tend to seek versus what men seek. Moreover, there is still a framing around how same behaviours exhibited by both men and women are perceived differently by people within organizations—particularly by organizational decision makers. Dismantling discrimination is something that will take a while to shift and unlearn.
But a big bias against women becoming leaders in the organization is around parenthood. We’re documenting that there is a real motherhood penalty, concurrent to a fatherhood advantage. In other words, women who have had a pregnancy were less likely to hold a leadership position than men who had a pregnant partner. Fathers experience an amplification of perceived preference and an advantage when it comes to ascending in an organization. My research explores this further to better understand why this is the case.
What is the research you’re planning to do around infertility and the workplace?
Along the same lines—to understand what discrimination in the workplace looks like in the parenthood context—and why—I will explore how leaders in organizations perceive employees who are receiving reproductive assistance. The current statistic is that one in six Canadians experience infertility in any given year. The experiences of undergoing fertility treatments are highly taxing on time and energy for individuals. You’re at the disposal of your doctor, you’re maybe also taking hormones, which come with a host of side effects. You’re also going through the emotional and psychological experiences associated with it, such as anxiety and shame, for examples. And not all women choose to disclose what they’re going through. I want to explore how organizations perceive their employees who are undergoing fertility treatments and how those who chose to disclose (or not disclose) their experience affects their emergence as a leader.
We also don’t want to ignore the partners of people who are going through fertility issues. I want to elucidate workplace approaches and perspectives for the non-childbearing partner as well. It’s important we understand how partners can be supported in the workplace as well to reduce the stigma around family planning.
