She received her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In her research she examines the roles of individuals in organizational change and the dynamics of relationships among coworkers.

We thank Larry Cummings, Herminia Ibarra, Anne Tsui, Bill Wooldridge, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. We thank Jill Graham for her discussant comments at the Academy of Management meetings, 1995. We thank the School of Business Administration, Interdisciplinary Committee for Organizational Studies and the vice president for research at the University of Michigan for their support of this research. Finally, we also thank Jeff Edwards for his advice about LISREL (although any misunderstandings remain our own). Under what conditions will women raise and promote gender-equity issues in their work organizations? We used structural equation modeling to analyze responses from a sample of over a thousand female managers to address this question. The results suggest that the perceived favorability of the organizational context fosters a willingness to sell gender-equity issues in organizations. The contextual factors that influenced willingness to sell were perceptions of a high degree of organizational support and of a warm and trusting relationship with critical decision makers, which enhanced the perceived probability of selling success and diminished the perceived image risk in selling. Organizational norms for issue selling also increased willingness to sell gender-equity issues by deflating perceived image risk. Individual differences did not predict willingness to sell gender-equity issues. We address the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.' Managerial time and attention are scarce resources in organizations (Pfeffer, 1992). Both managers and non-managers compete to gain the attention of top policy makers for issues that they believe are important to the organization. To do so, they engage in what Dutton and Ashford (1993: 398) labeled issue selling, calling the organization's attention to key trends, developments, and events that have implications for organizational performance. Through issue selling, people's concerns become part of the organization's collective awareness (Narayanan and Fahey, 1982; Ocasio, 1997). While relevant to all organizational members, issue selling is an activity that is typically associated with those who have managerial responsibility.

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