Women and Workplace Hierarchies

An article by Astrid Kunze has recently been accepted by The Review of Economics and Statistics. Publication in this prestigious journal triggers NHH´s bonus.

TEXT: SIGRID FOLKESTAD

The article «Women Helping Women? Evidence from Private Sector Data on Workplace Hierarchies» was recently published online at The Review of Economics and Statistics. This is a 100-year-old general journal of applied (especially quantitative) economics, edited at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Astrid Kunze and Amalia Miller at University of Virginia study gender spillovers in career advancement using 11 years of employer-employee matched data on the population of white-collar workers at over 4,000 private-sector establishments in Norway.

Kunze and Miller first find that women have significantly lower promotion rates than men across all ranks of the corporate hierarchy, even after controlling for a range of individual characteristics (age, education, tenure, experience) and including fixed effects for current rank, year, industry, and even work establishment.

In measuring the effects of female coworkers, they find positive gender spillovers across ranks (flowing from higher-ranking to lower-ranking women) but negative spillovers within ranks.

The finding that greater female representation at higher ranks narrows the gender gap in promotion rates at lower ranks suggests that policies that increase female representation in corporate leadership can have spillover benefits to women in lowers ranks.