No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Determinants of Gender Differences in Change in Pay among Job-Switching Executives
Abstract
The authors investigate what determines differences in change in pay between men and women executives who move to new employers. Using proprietary data of 2,034 executive placements from a global search firm, the authors observe narrower pay differences between men and women after job moves. The unconditional gap shrinks from 21.5% in the prior employer to 15% in the new employer. After controlling for typical explanatory factors, the residual gap falls by almost 30%, from 8.5% at the prior employer to 6.1% in the new placement. This change reflects a relative increase in performance-based compensation for women and a lower level of unexplained pay inequality generally in external placements. Controlling for individual fixed effects, observed women have higher pay raises than do men. Finally, the authors find suggestive evidence that pay differences may also be moderated by differences in the supply and demand for women executives.
... In contrast to the well-established gender pay gap, a few studies have found that under certain conditions, women may receive a premium relative to their equally qualified male counterparts (Groysberg, Healy, & Lin, 2022;Leslie, Manchester, & Dahm, 2017;Malladi & Mean, 2021). For example, focusing on CEOs and CFOs of US public firms, Malladi and Mean (2021) find that, at the aggregate level, women are compensated slightly higher than men. ...
... For example, focusing on CEOs and CFOs of US public firms, Malladi and Mean (2021) find that, at the aggregate level, women are compensated slightly higher than men. Similarly, analyzing the cash components of compensation, Groysberg, Healy, and Lin (2022) observed that, among job-switching executives, women receive higher raises than their male counterparts, despite evaluators' tendency to discount women's abilities, biases decrease in organizations seeking to achieve diversity goals, especially toward high-ability, high-potential women (Leslie, Manchester, & Dahm, 2017). ...
... Second, we controlled for differences in firm size, which tend to drive pay outcomes. Specifically, we used the number of employees (logarithmic transformation) to control for firm size, which is an important determinant of executive pay (Groysberg, Healy, & Lin, 2022;Peng, Sun, & Markóczy, 2015;Renner, Rives, & Bowlin, 2002;Tosi et al., 2000). Finally, because female representation in TMTs tends to mitigate the gender pay gap (Carter, Franco, & Gine, 2017;Elkinawy & Stater, 2011), we controlled for diversity of the TMT, which was measured as the percentage of female executives on the TMT present in ExecuComp. ...
In this study, we explore how early career advancement affects the gender pay gap among top executives and argue that an employee's age at attainment of an executive position serves as a signal that helps reduce biases toward women, thereby lowering gender pay differentials. We analyze career data of 803 executives from public high-technology manufacturing firms in the United States by collecting information from ExecuComp , Marquis Who's Who , LinkedIn , and Bloomberg . Our results indicate that attaining a top management position at a young age has a positive effect on pay, particularly among women, and this effect is due to the variable portion of compensation, which represents a large proportion of compensation among top executives. Further, recent research has identified a pay premium among high-potential female managers, although its key drivers remain unclear. This paper explores age as an observable signal that influences this premium and reduces the gender pay gap.
... Second, in addition to impacting the gender gap directly, universities' equity efforts may also affect the labor market in gender-specific ways, such as by increasing the demand for female faculty and female willingness-to-move, which can lead to raises for women via retention efforts. Through these direct and indirect channels, the increased equity focus in academia would be expected to increase the prevalence of large raises among women (Blackaby et al., 2005;Groysberg et al., 2022;Leslie et al., 2017), which is consistent with our findings. Third, complementary policies that facilitate equity enhancements also likely contribute to the narrowing gender wage gap in our sample. ...
... Differential attrition by gender correlated with wages could be a source of bias that would lead us to estimate a narrowing gender wage gap even when the gap has not truly narrowed (i.e., due to a change in the composition of our sample rather than a real change in gender wage dynamics). With regard to faculty mobility specifically, in addition to affecting attrition, mobility can affect the wage gap through gender differences in the earnings returns to mobility (Blackaby, Booth, & Frank, 2005;Groysberg, Healy, & Lin, 2022). ...
We study the conditional gender wage gap among faculty at public research universities in the U.S. We begin by using a cross-sectional dataset from 2016 to replicate the long-standing finding in research that, conditional on rich controls, female faculty earn less than their male colleagues. Next, we construct a data panel to track the evolution of the wage gap through 2021. We show that the gender wage gap is narrowing. It declined by more than 50% over the course of our data panel to the point where by 2021, it is no longer detectable at conventional levels of statistical significance.
... These are mainly studying the causes and roots of the research outcome (e.g., Post et al., 2022) or deepening into the effects of specific factors that may be correlated with women's issues in CEO positions (e.g., Jeong & Harrison, 2017). Groysberg et al. (2020), which focus on how internal and external labor markets may impact gender pay disparities. However, some studies on the international level rely on specific industries or sectors of economy (e.g., Athanasopoulou et al., 2018;Orser et al., 2019) or apply other theories to their research (e.g., Dixon-Fowler et al., 2013). ...
... • Salary disparities: It is confirmed by a large number of studies that women CEOs still earn less than men in many industries, which can affect their ability to accumulate wealth and compete for executive roles (e.g., Hutchinson et al., 2017;Groysberg et al., 2020); ...
Purpose: "Where Are All the Women CEOs?" (Fuhrmans, 2020) is a corporate question describing the growing sense of gender diversity and women's discrimination in top leadership positions. Nowadays, gender equality is an important topic and plays a strategically important role in corporations. However, women remain underrepresented and are treated differently than men counterparts in top executive positions. Thus, this research aims to provide insights into the major themes and critically reflect on the literature regarding women/female CEOs of the past two decades.
Design/methodology/approach: A Structured Literature Review (SLR) was conducted. All included articles stemmed from the ABS or ABDC journal rankings, resulting in 162 relevant articles. The time frame was 2000 through 2020 (20 years). Databases included in this review were: Scopus (Elsevier), ProQuest, Emerald Insight, JSTOR and ABI/Inform. All results were limited to English-only peer-reviewed scientific journal articles.
Findings: The analysed literature on women/female CEOs addresses their personal and professional characteristics (outer appearance and leadership style), their appointment and hierarchical advancement, their effect on different business organizational aspects (such as firm performance and governance), the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling/cliff. Furthermore, the findings suggest that women are underrepresented in CEO positions, face various discrimination statuses, and bear with cultural and ethnic barriers to elevating hierarchy.
Research limitations/implications: The coding process, in particular, the code grouping, could be influenced by the researchers’ subjectivity. In addition, not all collected data was analysed, as some codes and data were not considered beneficial for this research.
Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, such research regarding female leadership, namely the CEO position, is limited, and no structured literature review within the AJG/ABDC ranking was found during the data collection phase. Hence, such an effort can serve for future research to dive deeper into the topic of female/women CEOs. The method has been described in detail to ensure transparency and researchers’ reproducibility of the results.
... There are documented gender differences in the compensation agreements reached by top executives, but they are less likely with greater visibility (see the section below on ambiguity about what is negotiable) (Blevins et al. 2019), and the differences do not uniformly disadvantage women (Groysberg et al. 2020, Klein et al. 2021, Leslie et al. 2017. For instance, evidence indicates that "high-potential" executive women have the capacity to claim higher compensation than male peers when organizations have strategic diversity goals (Leslie et al. 2017). ...
A person's gender is not a reliable predictor of their negotiation behavior or outcomes, because the degree and character of gender dynamics in negotiation vary across situations. Systematic effects of gender on negotiation are best predicted by situational characteristics that cue gendered behavior or increase reliance on gendered standards for agreement. In this review, we illuminate two levers that heighten or constrain the potential for gender effects in organizational negotiations: ( a) the salience and relevance of gender within the negotiating context and ( b) the degree of ambiguity (i.e., lack of objective standards or information) with regard to what is negotiable, how to negotiate, or who the parties are as negotiators. In our summary, we review practical implications of this research for organizational leaders and individuals who are motivated to reduce gender-based inequities in negotiation outcomes. In conclusion, we suggest future directions for research on gender in organizational negotiations.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 9 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
What are useful ways to characterize varying employment systems? This article returns to an older idea, Internal Labor Markets (ILMs). The traditional assumption characterized ILMs as the core of the labor market but current thinking argues that ILMs have frayed. Little direct measurement has been carried out, however, and both viewpoints have relied on proxies or case studies. The author utilizes a new survey of employed US workers to provide an estimate of the incidence of ILMs and finds that between 25 and 40% percent of adult workers are in ILMs. The article then elaborates theory regarding the practices of ILMs, a theory grounded in the idea of complementary bundles of human resource practices, and asks what are the correlates of being in an ILM. Findings show that although wages in ILMs are no higher than non-ILM wages, ILMs are positively associated with other aspects of job quality and attitudes across the board.
Purpose
This study investigates whether the underrepresentation of women in executive-level roles within the supply chain management (SCM) field is justified or the result of gender injustices. The analysis examines if there is a gender compensation gap within executive-level SCM roles and whether performance differences or other observable factors explain disparities.
Design/methodology/approach
Publicly reported executive compensation and financial data are merged to empirically test if gender differences exist and investigate whether the underrepresentation of women in executive-level SCM roles is unjust.
Findings
Women occupy only 6.29% of the positions in the sample of 447 SCM executives. Unlike prior studies, we find that women executives receive higher compensation. The analysis does not identify observable factors explaining the limited inclusion of women in top-level roles, suggesting that gender injustices are prevalent in SCM.
Research limitations/implications
This study only considers observable factors and cannot conclusively determine if discrimination is occurring. The low level of inclusion of women in executive roles suggests that gender injustice is intrinsic within the SCM profession. These findings will hopefully motivate firms to undertake transformative actions that result in outcomes that advance gender equity, ultimately leading to social justice for female SCM executives.
Originality/value
The use of social justice and feminist theories, a focus on SCM roles, and an empirical methodology utilizing objective measures represents a novel approach to investigating gender discrimination in SCM organizations, complementing prior survey-based studies.
The gender pay gap is a complex inequality, made of a range of explained and unexplained inequalities in work and gender relations. Despite the introduction of mandatory reporting requirements in 2017, reductions of the gender pay gap have stagnated. This is especially true within the financial and legal services, a sector entrenched with assumptions of white, middle-class masculinity. In this thesis, I therefore utilise a theoretical framework of hegemonic masculinity to problematise the power held by men in the financial and legal sectors to integrate a meaningful understanding of discrimination in the gender pay gap. Through forty-two life-history interviews, supplemented with document analysis of gender pay gap reports from leading finance and law firms, contributions are made to the gender pay gap debate in two ways: the identification of gendered wage penalties and premiums across the career span, and a visible resistance to gender pay gap initiatives to maintain structures of inequality. The culture and structure of the financial and legal professions are argued as a central practise of hegemonic masculinity in the gender pay gap. Careers are narrowly defined upon extreme working patterns, entrepreneurial skills, the accumulation of masculinised human capital, and assumptions of continuous, full-time employment. Any deviations incur direct penalties on wages and bonuses received, and indirect penalties upon restricted career trajectories. A theoretical innovation of “glass bubbles” is therefore proposed: highly skilled occupations that exist in isolation from up-or-out career paths, offering no promotion opportunities and as such incur significant pay penalties over the life-course. I further argue that the need to conform to a hegemonic masculinity obscures structures of inequalities. Current strategies to reduce the gender pay gap are ineffective in challenging underlying drivers when failed to be seen as a legitimate inequality. False narratives of equality initiatives thus obscure stagnated progress on the gender pay gap. I therefore problematise the ability of senior leaders to enact meaningful change and are centred as a significant site of resistance. When taken together, this thesis contributes to existing research on the gender pay gap and careers in the profession services by demonstrating the practises and processes which incur gendered wage penalties and premiums.
Despite rhetoric supporting the advancement of women on corporate boards, meager evidence supports significant progress over the past decade in the United States. The authors examine archival board data (for more than 3,000 U.S. publicly traded firms) from 2002 to 2011 and find that a female is most likely to be appointed to a corporate board when a woman has just exited the position. A similar propensity occurs to reappoint a male when a man leaves, although the effect is smaller than for women. The authors argue that this “gender-matching heuristic” can impede progress in attaining gender diversity, regardless of intention, because it emphasizes the replacement of existing women rather than changing board composition. The authors replicate this effect in follow-up laboratory studies and show that “what works” to increase the representation of women on boards, irrespective of gender matching, is to increase the number of women in the candidate pool.
This study compares the careers of matched samples of 69 female executives and 69 male: executives try examining perceived barriers and facilitators of advancement, self-reported developmental experiences, and career histories. Consistent with tokenism theory, women reported greater barriers, such as lack of culture fit and being excluded from informal networks, and greater importance of having a good track. record and developing relationships to facilitate advancement than did men. Career success, measured by organizational level and compensation, was positively related to breadth of experience and developmental assignments for both genders, but successful women were less likely than successful men to report that mentoring facilitated their advancement. Developmental experiences and career histories were similar for female and male executives, but men bad more overseas assignments and women had more assignments with nonauthority relationships.
The intent of this book is to review the research on selection interviews from an integrative perspective. The book is organized around a conception of the interview as a multistage process. The process begins as the interviewer forms initial impressions of the applicant from previewing paper credentials and from initial encounters with the applicant. The actual face-to-face interview follows, consisting of verbal, nonverbal, and paralinguistic exchanges between interviewer and applicant. The process concludes with the interviewer forming final impressions and judgments of the applicant's qualifications and rendering a decision (e.g., hire, reject, gather more information). The book follows from this general sequence of events, with each chapter focusing on a stage of the interview. In exploring the phases of the interview, the text draws freely from basic research on social cognition, decision making, information processing, and social interaction.
Chapter 1: An overview of selection interview research and practice
Chapter 2: Cognitive processes of the interviewer
Chapter 3: First encounters: Impression formation in the preinterview phase
Chapter 4: Social interaction in the interview
Chapter 5: Final impressions: judgments and decisions in the post interview phase
Chapter 6: Alternative models of the interview process
Chapter 7: Evaluating the selection interview
Chapter 8: Legal issues in selection interviews
Chapter 9: Strategies for improving selection interviews
Chapter 10: Other functions of the interview
Chapter 11: Concluding comments
References
Author Index
Index
Fewer women than men become executive managers. They earn less over their careers, hold more junior positions, and exit the occupation at a faster rate. We compiled a large panel data set on executives and formed a career hierarchy to analyze mobility and compensation rates. We find that, controlling for executive rank and background, women earn higher compensation than men, experience more income uncertainty, and are promoted more quickly. Amongst survivors, being female increases the chance of becoming CEO. Hence, the unconditional gender pay gap and job-rank differences are primarily attributable to female executives exiting at higher rates than men in an occupation where survival is rewarded with promotion and higher compensation.
Empirical findings on the link between gender diversity and performance have been inconsistent. This paper presents three competing predictions of the organizational gender diversity–performance relationship: a positive linear prediction derived from the resource-based view of the firm, a negative linear prediction derived from self-categorization and social identity theories, and an inverted U-shaped curvilinear prediction derived from the integration of the resource-based view of the firm with self-categorization and social identity theories. This paper also proposes a moderating effect of industry type (services vs. manufacturing) on the gender diversity–performance relationship. The predictions were tested in publicly listed Australian organizations using archival quantitative data with a longitudinal research design. The results show partial support for the positive linear and inverted U-shaped curvilinear predictions as well as for the proposed moderating effect of industry type. The curvilinear relationship indicates that different proportions of organizational gender diversity have different effects on organizational performance, which may be attributed to different dynamics as suggested by the resource-based view and self-categorization and social identity theories. The results help reconcile the inconsistent findings of past research that focused on the linear gender diversity–performance relationship. The findings also show that industry context can strengthen or weaken the effects of organizational gender diversity on performance.
Drawing on neoclassical economic, internal labor market, and devaluation theories, we examine how the sex composition of jobs and the sex of individual workers affect earnings, depending upon the formalization of the pay type. Using personnel data for over 8,000 employees, we confirm the existence of a negative relationship between earnings and the proportion female in a job. We also find that for less-formalized pay types (cash incentive bonuses), sex-composition and individual-sex effects are larger than for more formalized pay (merit raises and base salary). Together, these findings support devaluation explanations, suggest that incentive bonuses may widen the earnings gap between women and men, and have implications for the design of pay structures in organizations.
The authors evaluated a sample of 610 managers working in 20 Fortune 500 companies in a longitudinal study to test hypotheses about male and female managers' compensation associated with internal and external labor market strategies. Both managers' gender and their labor market experience were hypothesized to affect their total cash compensation. Data confirmed hypotheses, but analyses of differences between male and female managers showed that only the male managers benefited from an external labor market strategy. Female managers who used an external labor market strategy did not receive greater compensation than female managers who used an internal labor market strategy. The discussion focuses on why female managers do not receive the same benefit from an external labor market strategy as male managers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Fixed effects regression methods are used to analyze longitudinal data with repeated measures on both independent and dependent variables. They have the attractive feature of controlling for all stable characteristics of the individuals, whether measured or not. This is accomplished by using only within-individual variation to estimate the regression coefficients. This paper surveys the wide variety of fixed effects methods and their implementation in SAS, specifically, linear models with PROC GLM, logistic regression models with PROC LOGISTIC, models for count data with PROC GENMOD, and survival models with PROC PHREG.
In most OECD countries, only very few women succeed in reaching top executive positions. In this paper, the probability of promotion into VP and CEO positions is estimated based on employer-employee data on all Danish companies observed during the period 1997-2007. After controlling for a large number of family-related variables, including take-up history of maternity and paternity leave and proxies for 'female-friendly' companies, there is still a considerable gap in the promotion probabilities for CEO positions, but not for VP positions. Thus, the results cannot confirm recent theories on 'belief flipping' or disappearance of statistical discrimination against women who succeed getting into career track positions. The results reflect that the hiring decision and the decision to enter a top position as 'number one,' i.e. CEO, in the organization is very different from the decision to hire or become VP, i.e. 'number two' or lower.
Individuals often enter similar jobs via two different routes: internal mobility and external hiring. I examine how the differences between these routes affect subsequent outcomes in those jobs. Drawing on theories of specific skills and incomplete information, I propose that external hires will initially perform worse than workers entering the job from inside the firm and have higher exit rates, yet they will be paid more and have stronger observable indicators of ability as measured by experience and education. I use the same theories to argue that the exact nature of internal mobility (promotions, lateral transfers, or combined promotions and transfers) will also affect workers’ outcomes. Analyses of personnel data from the U.S. investment banking arm of a financial services company from 2003 to 2009 confirm strong effects on pay, performance, and mobility of how workers enter jobs. I find that workers promoted into jobs have significantly better performance for the first two years than workers hired into similar jobs and lower rates of voluntary and involuntary exit. Nonetheless, the external hires are initially paid around 18 percent more than the promoted workers and have higher levels of experience and education. The hires are also promoted faster. I further find that workers who are promoted and transferred at the same time have worse performance than other internal movers.
Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980-2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution than at the middle or bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human- capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women's work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high-skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than, say, occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences.
Despite lab-based evidence supporting the argument that double standards—by which one group is unfairly held to stricter standards than another—explain observed gender differences in evaluations, it remains unclear whether double standards also affect evaluations in organization and market contexts, where competitive pressures create a disincentive to discriminate. Using data from a field study of investment professionals sharing recommendations on an online platform, and drawing on status theory, we identify the conditions under which double standards in multistage evaluations contribute to unequal outcomes for men and women. We find that double standards disadvantaging women are most likely when evaluators face heightened search costs related to the number of candidates being compared or higher levels of uncertainty stemming from variation in the amount of pertinent information available. We rule out that systematic gender differences in the actions or characteristics of the investment professionals being evaluated are driving these results. By more carefully isolating the role of this status-based mechanism of discrimination for perpetuating gender inequality, this study identifies not only whether but also the conditions under which gender-based double standards lead to a female disadvantage, even when relevant and objective information about performance is readily available.
To date, few empirical studies have explored potential differences in the effects of external labor market hiring on the compensation of male and female managers. Using longitudinal data from a sample of public high-technology firms on individual top executives' total compensation in the United States, and the separate components of base and variable pay, the authors study the effects of being an external hire for men and women. The results suggest that women who are external labor market hires are disadvantaged, in both base and variable compensation, compared with internal placements. The analyses also provide some evidence that having greater representation of women in top positions reduces the disadvantaging effects for women of being an external hire.
Using a large sample of executives in S&P 1500 firms over 1996–2010, we document significant salary and total compensation gaps between female and male executives and explore two possible explanations for the gaps. We find support for greater female risk aversion as one contributing factor. Female executives hold significantly lower equity incentives and demand larger salary premiums for bearing a given level of compensation risk. These results suggest that females’ risk aversion contributes to the observed lower pay levels through its effect on ex ante compensation structures. We also find evidence that the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards affects the size of the gaps. In firms with a higher proportion of female directors on the board, the gaps in salary and total pay levels are lower. Together, these findings suggest that female higher risk aversion may act as a barrier to full pay convergence, despite the mitigating effect from greater gender diversity on the board.
With few exceptions, studies have conceived of the glass ceiling as reflecting internal promotion biases. In this article, the authors argue that glass ceiling patterns can also be the result of external recruitment and hiring processes. Using data on people applying by means of the Internet for jobs at 441 small- and medium-sized high-tech firms, they find evidence that the glass ceiling is produced by both internal and external hiring processes. On the supply side, females are sorted into lower-level job queues than males. On the demand side, screening biases against women also are evident, but a series of “what if” simulations suggest that demand-side screening processes play a comparatively minor role in producing the glass ceiling pattern. These results suggest that bias remediation policies designed to equalize gender differences in hiring chances are likely to be less effective than recruitment and outreach policies designed to improve gender disparities in candidate pools.
Abundant research has documented a gender pay gap; women earn less than men, all else being equal. Against the backdrop of an overall female penalty, we propose that the widespread adoption of diversity goals in organizations creates a female premium for certain women. We integrate the economic principle of supply and demand with theory from the field of strategic human resource management and theorize that individuals perceive high-potential women - who have the abilities needed to reach the upper echelons of organizations, where women remain underrepresented - as more valuable for achieving organizational diversity goals than high-potential men and, in turn, reward them with higher pay. Two field studies (Studies 1 and 3) and two laboratory experiments (Studies 2 and 4) reveal a female premium that is unique to high-potential women (Studies 1 and 2), driven by perceptions that high-potential women have more diversity value than high-potential men (Studies 2 and 4), and larger in contexts where diversity goals are stronger (Studies 3 and 4). Our theory and findings challenge the assumption that the gender pay gap uniformly disadvantages women and offer new insight into why and when the female penalty reverses and becomes a female premium.
We study the sources of women’s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search. Using data that include proprietary information on 10,970 individuals considered by a search firm, we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles. Contrary to received wisdom, we find limited evidence that demand-side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting. What gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply-side and demand-side actors. Once considered for a position, women are no less likely than men to be hired—though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm. Our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates’ “self-steering” behavior from the “pipeline bending” of hiring agents. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market.
This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.
In this issue of the ILRReview, the first five articles provide important new evidence on gender and employment. The papers were all independently submitted and were refereed through the usual editorial process. Because the papers' unifying theme is gender and labor market outcomes, the Editors felt that creating a symposium out of this new body of work would serve the research community studying gender, as well as the policymakers concerned with gender and labor market outcomes. All of the articles use new data sources or advanced statistical techniques to greatly enhance our understanding of gender and employment.
In this study, I summarize the current state of executive compensation, discuss measurement and incentive issues, document recent trends in executive pay in both U.S. and international firms, and analyze the evolution of executive pay over the past century. Most recent analyses of executive compensation have focused on efficient-contracting or managerial-power rationales for pay, while ignoring or downplaying the causes and consequences of disclosure requirements, tax policies, accounting rules, legislation, and the general political climate. A major theme of this study is that government intervention has been both a response to and a major driver of time trends in executive compensation over the past century, and that any explanation for pay that ignores political factors is critically incomplete.
The trends in the gender pay gap in the United States form a somewhat mixed picture. On the one hand, after a half a century of stability in the earnings of women relative to men, there has been a substantial increase in women's relative earnings since the late 1970s. One of the things that make this development especially dramatic and significant is that the recent changes contrast markedly with the relative stability of earlier years. On the other hand, there is still a gender pay gap. Women continue to earn considerably less than men on average, and the convergence that began in the late 1970s slowed noticeably in the 1990s. Is this slowdown just a blip in an overall trend, or has the pay gap converged as far as it can? We look at this issue in depth and make some predictions for the future.
This article proposes a four-cell typology of career systems, reflecting two critical dimensions along which firms choose a staffing strategy: supply flow and assignment flow. We suggest that this typology reflects, in a human resources context, the different choices firms make in managing their overall strategy. The career systems profiles that follow from the typology both describe and predict the composition of a company's work force.
Building upon the gender-based study conducted by Brett and Stroh (1997), we examined the moderating effects of gender and race on the relationship between changing employers and compensation attainment. The results suggest that, among graduates of M.B.A. (master of business administration) programs, the pay premium associated with an external labor market strategy is primarily a white-male phenomenon. White-male pay differentials were observed only among graduates who changed employers. These results challenge traditional labor-economic models of the compensation attainment process.
This paper analyzes data describing jobs in 100 establishments in order to test hypotheses about the characteristics of jobs and organizations associated with the structure of internal promotion ladders. The diversity of labor market arrangements found within the organizations indicates only weak support for hypotheses linking internal labor markets to organizational or sectoral imperatives. At the job level, however, there is support for hypotheses linking job ladders to firm-specific skills, organizational structure, gender distinctions, technology, occupational differentiation, the institutional environment, and the interests of unions. The paper concludes with an examination of how promotion ladders are formed from clusters of jobs associated with each other by occupation, skill, or gender composition.
We investigate whether and when highly trained human capital constitutes a rent- sustaining resource. Our study of 444 CEOs celebrated on the covers of major US business magazines found an advantage accruing to graduates of selective universities. Such CEOs led firms with higher and more sustained market valuations. The advantage was strongest for undergraduate programs as these related to the kinds of talent demanded of a CEO. The advantage also was greatest in smaller firms where CEO discretion might be highest and for younger CEOs who may benefit most from college and are less able to appropriate rents. Finally, the advantage accrued to graduates of more recent years, when selective schools had become less socially elitist and increasingly meritocratic, thus favoring human versus social capital.
This paper examines whether women benefit from working under female management using Swedish matched employer-employee panel data. I account for unobserved heterogeneity among both workers and firms potentially correlated with manager gender. The results show a substantial negative and statistically significant correlation between the proportion of female managers and the establishment’s gender wage gap. However, estimates that account for sorting on unobserved worker skills do not support that that managers favor same-sex workers in wage setting. Additional results show female-led organizations recruit more non-managerial, high-wage women but this is primarily due to (unobserved) firm attributes rather than gender-specific management practices.
This article develops and tests hypotheses about the determinants of sex segregation in occupations employing both men and women, analyzing data on a diverse sample of California establishments. In the few instances in which men and women perform similar work roles, the jobs are typically done in distinct organizational settings, and when an enterprise employs both sexes in the same occupation, men and women are usually assigned different job titles. The findings are consistent with the theory of statistical discrimination, wich posits that employers reserve some jobs for men and others for women. However, little evidence is found that employers' practices reflect efficient and rational responses to sex differences in skills and turnover costs. Alternative explanations for gender segregation within and among organizations are suggested and the research necessary to develop a more accurate account of the sexual division of labor in the workplace is outlined.
Data from a sample of about 300 large establishments in the San Francisco Bay area were used to study internal labor markets. The extent to which internal labor market arrangements were present was positively related to the provision of training, to being in the industrial core, to having a personnel department, and to being a branch unit. Internal labor market arrangements were negatively related to the percentage of the work force covered by collective bargaining. Once other factors were controlled, there was no effect of change in size on internal labor market practices. A similar pattern of results was observed when manufacturing and nonmanufacturing establishments were analyzed separately, although the effects of size, training, and having a personnel department were stronger in nonmanufacturing organizations. The evidence suggests that organizational variables as well as economic considerations should be incorporated in explanations of the presence of internal labor markets.
Occupational segregation by sex occurs everywhere, causing labour market rigidity and economic inefficiency, wasting human resources, preventing change, disadvantaging women and perpetuating gender inequalities. The author reviews the principal theoretical explanations for its existence and persistence: neo-classical and human capital; institutional and labour market segmentation; and gender discrimination. Its complex relationship with female-male pay differentials is also explored. Though all prove pertinent, the most compelling explanations of occupational segregation by sex are gender theories, given the enormous overlap in abilities and preferences of individual men and women.
Individuals often enter similar jobs via two different routes: internal mobility and external hiring. I examine how the differences between these routes affect subsequent outcomes in those jobs. Drawing on theories of specific skills and incomplete information, I propose that external hires will initially perform worse than workers entering the job from inside the firm and have higher exit rates, yet they will be paid more and have stronger observable indicators of ability as measured by experience and education. I use the same theories to argue that the exact nature of internal mobility (promotions, lateral transfers, or combined promotions and transfers) will also affect workers’ outcomes. Analyses of personnel data from the U.S. investment banking arm of a financial services company from 2003 to 2009 confirm strong effects on pay, performance, and mobility of how workers enter jobs. I find that workers promoted into jobs have significantly better performance for the first two years than workers hired into similar jobs and lower rates of voluntary and involuntary exit. Nonetheless, the external hires are initially paid around 18 percent more than the promoted workers and have higher levels of experience and education. The hires are also promoted faster. I further find that workers who are promoted and transferred at the same time have worse performance than other internal movers.
This study addresses a phenomenon observed in past research on career success and attainment in which White male managers and executives seemingly gain more from external labor market mobility than do their female and minority male counterparts. Focusing on the executive search industry, the authors found that executive search firm representatives are more likely to contact White males than females and minority males, that the compensation advantage resulting from an external labor market strategy is strongest among White male managers and executives, and that search firm—initiated contacts moderate the relationship between compensation and mobility in an external labor market. Implications for management research, theory, and practice are discussed.
This paper investigates whether and how individual managers aect corporate behavior and performance. We construct a manager-rm matched panel data set which enables us to track the top managers across dierent rms over time. We nd that manager xed eects matter for a wide range of corporate decisions. A signicant extent of the heterogeneity in investment, nancial and organizational practices of rms can be explained by the presence of manager
We look at the relationship between the number of assignments, the length of international assignment experience, the type of employer commissioning the international assignment, the individual's career stage at the first assignment, and career advancement: the time that the executives took to be appointed to the CEO position from the start of their career. Our sample of 1001 chief executives, based in 23 countries and affiliated with the 500 largest corporations in Europe and the 500 largest in the United States, allows us to examine important individual- and organization-level contingencies that affect the relationship between international assignment experience and career advancement. We find that international experience slows the executives' ascent to the top, longer assignments and a larger number of assignments being detrimental to their speed of ascent to top corporate positions. Further, international assignments at corporations other than the CEOs' current employer and assignments taken at later stages of executives' careers damage career advancement.
This paper proposes a four-cell typology of career systems, which describes the way different corporate strategies reflect the nature of executive labor markets. The two critical dimensions of the model, “supply flow” and “assignment flow,” reflect the external and internal movement of executives. We use recent examples from industry to demonstrate the way in which business and career system strategies align. We then examine individual background and personality variables, drawn from a ten-year study tracking 125 MBA graduates, to show how executives sort themselves into the career system best suited to their needs.
The broader purpose of this research is to begin to tie together a general theory of career systems that focuses on the level of the firm in its changing strategic and industry context.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 1992. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-234). Photocopy.
This paper analyzes changes in wage differentials between white men and white women over the period 1993–2006 across the entire wage distribution using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We decompose distributional changes in the gender wage gap to assess the contribution of observed characteristics measuring individual productivity. We find that the gender wage gap narrowed by more than 13 percent at the lowest decile and by less than 4 percent at the highest decile. The decomposition results indicate that changes in the gender wage gap are mainly attributable to changes in educational attainment at the top of the wage distribution, while a sizeable part of the changes is due to work history changes at the bottom. Our findings suggest that the educational success of women could reduce the gender wage gap at the bottom of the distribution both before and during the 1990s but did not trigger a strong decline at the top of the distribution until today.
Bertrand and Hallock (2001: 3) present compelling evidence that female executives in the United States earned 45 percent less total compensation than their male counterparts for 1992–1997. We complement their results by analyzing data over a longer time period and, more importantly, contend that most of the unexplained gender difference in total pay among executives was due to gender differences in the portion of variable pay, in particular a different cash payout from stock option exercises.
With few exceptions, past research on the glass ceiling has assumed that the barriers to women’s advancement in organizations reflect sex differences in internal promotion processes. This assumption, however, has never before been the subject of close scrutiny. We examine sex differences in how are jobs filled - both internally and externally - across the levels of the hierarchy of a large BioPharma firm. There is an apparent “glass ceiling” observed among people filling these jobs: the percentage of females declines over increasing levels of the hierarchy. However, when considering the gender distribution of the pool of candidates for these openings, among both internals and externals, we find that women are more likely than men to be hired. We find that this female advantage declines as one goes up the hierarchy, but only weak evidence for the glass ceiling argument that women experience barriers to access for jobs at higher levels of the organization. Contrary to the glass door theory, we find little evidence that women experience barriers in external hiring. Women are more likely than men to be hired from outside the firm, and this pattern does not decline as one goes up the levels of the organizational hierarchy. For both internals and externals, a key factor producing differences in gender composition across levels of the organization is the gendered nature of the candidate pools for jobs at different levels.
Numerous studies have examined patterns of gender inequality in organizational advancement, with some showing results indicative of “glass ceilings,” where gender disparities are strong at the upper reaches of the organization, while others suggest “sticky floors,” where the gender differences in advancement occur at the lower levels of the organization. These studies, however, have been less clear on the mechanisms that produce these descriptive patterns. With few exceptions, extant studies have focused on internal promotion practices and have not addressed the extent to which these patterns might reflect gender differences in external recruitment and hiring into the organization. We construct queues consisting of both external and internal candidates - the set of candidates under consideration - for over 2,200 job openings during a 27-month period for a large retail bank. We find that women are more likely than men to be hired, and that this pattern holds for jobs up and down the organizational hierarchy. The applicant pools are themselves gendered, however, with women comprising a lower percentage of the applicant pools for high-level jobs, but a greater proportion of the pools for lower-level jobs. Since women are more likely than men to advance from each applicant pool to hire at all levels of the hierarchy, the apparent “glass ceiling” observed among job incumbents is not due to gendered screening practices. Instead, the roots of gender inequality in this firm lie in the initial sorting of applicants into queues.
Using data from 739 U.S. managers and professionals and 593 Hong Kong Chinese managers and professionals we examined the moderating effects of gender on the relationship between changing employers and compensation attainment. While there were no gender-based compensation differences early in the careers of these individuals (in 1991), large pay differences favoring men were observed in 1999 only among those who had followed an external labor market strategy. These results demonstrate that this phenomenon is not isolated to labor markets of the United States and strengthen the view that much of the observed pay differential favoring men has its origins in extra-firm mobility, not intra-firm gender discrimination. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
After a quick recapitulation of previous reviews of the employment interview, recent research from about 1975 is reviewed and summarized. Research dealing with the reliability and validity of the interview, methodological issues, decision making, interviewer training, minority characteristics, nonverbal behavior, interviewee characteristics, and interviewee training is summarized. Trends and directions are noted, suggestions for further research extended, and a discussion of why persistence in the use of interview exists is presented.
The last major narrative review of the employment interview was published over 10 years ago. Since then, 278 studies have examined numerous aspects of the interview. This review summarizes and critically examines this recent research. A framework is developed that partitions research into social, cognitive, individual difference, measurement, and outcome factors. This organizing framework allows an examination of trends over time and facilitates identification of gaps in the empirical literature. Within each of these major factors, each research topic is identified, defined, and reviewed. For each topic, the results of the previous 3 narrative reviews are briefly summarized, recent research is reviewed and critiqued, and directions for future research are identified.