Kim Elsesser

Kim Elsesser
elsesser@ucla.edu
Research Scholar since 2003

Elsesser received her Ph.D. in Psychology from UCLA in 2003. She also holds graduate degrees in management and operations research from MIT. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Elsesser was a principal at Morgan Stanley where she comanaged a hedge fund. She has recently served as a lecturer at UCLA in the Departments of Women’s Studies and Psychology. Her research focuses on gender issues in the workplace including gender differences in leadership, gender discrimination, workplace friendship, workplace romance, and sexual harassment. She has consulted on several large-scale national studies relating to gender and work.

Her current research project is titled “Evaluations of Female and Male Bosses: Quantitative and Qualitative Results from a U.S. Online Survey.” This study of 60,470 men and women examined evaluations of participants’ current managers as well as their preferences for male and female managers, in general. A cross-sex bias emerged in the evaluations of one’s current boss, where men judged their female managers more favorably and women judged male managers more favorably. However, when asked if they had a preference for the gender of their boss, participants reported preferring male over female bosses by more than a 2:1 ratio.