Gender‐related institutional environments, gender pay gap/equality and prosocial behaviors: A cross‐national meta‐analysis

Abstract

We adopt a meta‐analytic approach to study the relationship between gender‐related institutional environments/logics at both organizational level and societal level on the one hand and gender heterogeneities in individual prosocial behaviors on the other. Analyzing data from 138 empirical studies covering 35 countries, we obtain evidence of gender heterogeneity in prosocial behaviors under different gender‐related institutional environments/logics. Our meta‐analysis helps obtain several important findings. For instance, a gender gap in pro‐environmental behaviors is more likely to be observed in societies/countries with low gender egalitarianism with women showing less prosocial behavior than their men counterparts. Moreover, women under the same institutional environments also show significantly more anti‐corruption behaviors than do their men counterparts, while this difference is much smaller (i.e., with smaller effect size) given the institutions of high gender egalitarianism. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for academic research and managerial practice.