Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine gender-related management stereotypes, perceived gender bias and evaluations of actual managers, and to directly compare stereotypes and ratings of actual managers. Design/methodology/approach -Questionnaires were distributed to employees in the bank and insurance sector, and 240 participants rated their actual managers and stereotypes of male and female managers. Findings -Men evaluated the female manager stereotype more positively on communal attributes, and the male manager stereotype more positively on agentic attributes. Women evaluated the female manager stereotype more positively on both communal and agentic attributes, but perceived a higher degree of gender bias in favor of male managers than men did. Actual male and female managers were rated similarly. Still, ratings of actual male managers corresponded more with stereotypes of male than female managers, and ratings of actual female managers corresponded more with stereotypes of female than male managers. Research limitations/implications -Future research needs to determine the direction of association between stereotypes and evaluations of actual managers, and the relative importance of agentic over communal attributes. Practical implications -While women appeared biased in favor of their own gender, men may underestimate the difficulties that female managers encounter. Managers and human resource practitioners should notice these different views, and recognize that gender equality is not achieved in Sweden.Originality/value -The present study contributes with data from an egalitarian society with a positive view of female managers, and a direct comparison of stereotypes and workplace evaluations.

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The present studies sought to investigate what kind of stereotypes are used in Sweden to describe male and female managers, and whether gender-neutral characteristics are used in the description of requisite management characteristics. In Study 1, participants answered open-ended questions on good, bad, female and male management. Requisite management characteristics showed a greater resemblance to the descriptions of female managers than male. In Study 2, female managers were rated more positively than men, and attributes ascribed to men in Study 1 were considered just as descriptive of women. Although participants described female managers more positively than male, responses often implied a norm of men as managers. In this way, prescriptive aspects of the stereotype may still work against female managers, despite the more feminine description of management.

Sweden is known for its political will to gender equality. Sweden is also a country with a strong tradition of transparency in university recruitments. In this article, the assessment practices in the appointment of full professors in one Swedish university are investigated from an intersectional and postcolonial perspective on gender and place/space. Using a multimethod approach to investigate written evaluations of applicants, recruitment group meeting minutes and interviews with reviewers, the results show that there is great variation in how evaluation criteria are applied and filled with meaning. Moreover, in more than half of the appointment decisions the reviewers disagreed. The interview results show a structural bias operating towards researchers applying from non-Western university contexts. At an aggregated level, national applicants have 3.88 times greater chance to be proposed for a position and national women applicants are the most likely to be proposed for the position. 1 | INTRODUCTION 1 Gender bias in the evaluation of academic staff (O'Connor & Hagan, 2016) during the professorship appointment process (van den Brink & Benschop, 2011) and in research grant distribution (Wennerås & Wold, 1997) is well known and researched worldwide. In a context where gender aspects are actually considered in research into peer review,

In the flexible Swedish labour market, the concept of employability has grown important. Within a neoliberal framework, accountability for one’s possibility to successfully obtain or keep employment rests with the individual. In contrast, within a social welfare discourse the individual is offered care and support in order to gain employment. The present study combined intersectional and discourse analytical approaches with the understanding that individual employability is subjectively constructed in the exploration of labour market induction, employability constructions and categorizations in the discourse used by government agencies directly involved in the labour market integration of newly arrived migrants. Public documents comprising information on labour market entrance, employability and associated concepts such as competence building and career development were analysed. The employability constructions were often contradictory—placed at the crossroads of neoliberal and social welfare discourses—and built on tacit assumptions and influenced by stereotypes. Conveying such employability constructions further could lead to exclusion from long-term employment and have detrimental psychological and health repercussions. Instead, it is of importance to work towards reconstructing migrants’ employability in this new context without damaging influence from inflexible categorizations and stereotypes.