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The underrepresentation of women in male-dominated fields of study can generate a lack of role models for female students, which may influence their career choices. This paper sheds light on this question, investigating the existence of impacts of the gender composition of instructors and peers in the Department of Economics from a selective Brazilian university. Specifically, we analyze whether having higher shares of female professors and classmates throughout undergraduate studies in Economics affects female students' labor market outcomes. We use comprehensive administrative data from the University of Sao Paulo, containing information on students' academic results and students', instructors', and course sections' characteristics. We merge these data with Brazilian labor market and firm ownership data to obtain a broad range of career outcomes, including labor force participation, occupational choices, career progression, and wages. To overcome endogeneity issues arising from students' self-selection into professors and peers, we exploit the random assignment of students in the first-semester classes and focus on mandatory courses. A higher representation of women in a male-dominated field, such as Economics, increases female students' labor force participation. Moreover, larger female faculty shares increase the probability that a female student becomes a top manager. These results suggest ways to counteract the highly discussed glass ceiling in high-earning occupations. We show that students' academic performance and elective course-choice are not driving the effects. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that higher shares of female classmates may increase the likelihood of working during undergraduate studies, leading to stronger labor market attachment.

We develop a model of implicitly biased decision-making in competitive promotions. In our model, a decision-maker needs to choose who to promote to a top position. The decision-maker always prefers a skilled agent over an unskilled one but is biased in favour of agents from a certain group when choosing among identical agents. The bias is implicit in the sense of having no direct payoff consequences for the decision-maker, and thus being imperceptible to a decision-maker who is initially unaware of it. As agents compete with each other in a promotion contest, their strategic behavior can either exacerbate or attenuate the initial decision-maker's bias. Our model shows even small biases can translate into substantial differences in promotion outcomes between groups.

Using a novel regulatory dataset, we study board and senior manager diversity of gender, age and nationality in UK banks. Gender diversity increased steadily over the last two decades, albeit from a very low base and to only 20% by the end of 2020. Moreover, we find evidence of a ‘glass ceiling’, with the proportion of females increasing more slowly in the most influential roles. Age and nationality diversity changed less over time. Empirical results suggest that gender and nationality diversity are related to positive risk and performance outcomes, whereas the reverse is true for age diversity. However, these findings are derived from analysing differences between banks, which exhibit substantially more variation than changes in diversity within banks over time. When we only exploit variation in diversity within banks, we do not find any relationship between diversity and outcomes.

This paper studies the gender disparities among top incomes in Brazil during the period 1994-2013 using administrative data on the universe of formal-sector job spells and detailed information on educational attainment, employers, and occupations performed. Over these two decades, differences in pay and participation between genders have narrowed, yet the process has been slow and women are still severely underrepresented, especially within the very top percentiles of the earnings distribution. The following findings highlight the role of firms and occupations in explaining these patterns. At the start of the period, women in the top percentile of the distribution owe a larger fraction of their earnings to working at high-paying firms than do men, while men’s top incomes are in excess of their firms’ average pay. In addition, belonging to the top percentile is initially much more persistent for men than for women. Both of these differences have vanished over time. I also document that the increase in the share in participation of women in top percentiles is primarily a within-firm and within-occupation phenomenon, which suggests that the evolution of cultural and institutional elements deserves further examination. Finally, I study the careers of female and male top earners, finding that the path to the top percentiles of the distribution is quite different across genders: Top-earning women work in larger firms from the start of their careers. Top-earning men earn large earnings premia above what their firm average pays throughout their career, and after their mid-30s switch employers at a higher frequency than women.

Using a large sample of quarterly earnings conference call transcripts, we investigate gender issues in interactions between two high-profile professions—sell-side analysts and public firm executives. We find that women are generally less “visible” on conference calls. Specifically, female analysts have fewer conference call participation opportunities. Conditional on participation, female analysts are allowed fewer opportunities to ask follow-up questions and speak less compared with male counterparts. Female analysts speak with more positive tone, less uncertainty, less numerical content, fewer speech hesitations, and fewer back and forth conversations with firm management. Female executives have shorter discourses and receive more rounds of questions from analysts. However, female executives exhibit more certainty and hesitate less, indicating superior abilities in answering analysts’ questions. Our analysis of speech interruptions finds that female analysts are interrupted less by female, but not male, executives. Female executives receive more interruptions from both male analysts and executives and are more likely to be challenged by male subordinates. The equity market also discounts female analysts’ participation. Overall, our results are consistent with gender-based discrimination.

Worldwide, women remain underrepresented in management roles, and the environment in which women are professionally trained seems to matter. This study exploits a setting where college students are split into two groups based on entry-level scores. Throughout college, students in the same group take most of the courses together. While the benefit of the first group is the interaction with high achievers, the cost is the relative disadvantage in grades. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find this relative disadvantage harms women's future chances of becoming managers. The evidence is consistent with competitive adversities curbing women's aspirations.

Why do women hit the glass ceiling? Women are hired, but then fail to rise through the ranks. We propose a novel explanation for this pattern, namely preference- and belief-free discrimination. In our setting, an employer can increase effort by inducing differential value distributions for a promotion across workers, who compete for the promotion by exerting effort. Initially, workers possess the same distribution of valuations. Introducing inequality between workers makes them more recognisable, reducing their information rent, which in turn increases effort. However, higher inequality reduces competition. If value is re-distributed, the reduction in information rent outweighs the loss in competitiveness, making discrimination between workers optimal.

The popular and academic literatures report that women, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are under-represented on US corporate boards of directors, relative to their incidence in the US labor force. We confirm this observation by tabulating the presence of female and under-represented racial minority (URM) directors on the boards of the S&P 1500 firms. We examine two hypotheses that may explain this empirical regularity. The first is that qualified female and URM candidates are scarce. Firms must compete for their services, putting price pressure on their compensation and leading to higher compensation for female and non-URM directors. The second hypothesis is a perception that women and URM directors in general are less valuable to firms, leading to lower compensation for them relative to their white male peers. Our evidence is mixed: we find that women (URM) make significantly higher (insignificantly lower) compensation than males and non-URM directors, controlling for firm and director variables (like age, education, achievements, and committee appointments). However, when we compare the compensation of female and URM directors against male and non-URM directors’ compensation on the same boards, that significant difference reverses, even though they have more education and more achievements than those peers. This result is consistent with the “myopic hypothesis” that predicts female and URM are paid less because of a biased view of their value to the board. However, when we compare the average compensation of female and URM directors who hold board leadership roles (dual CEO-Chairs and independent lead directors), we find very low participation of female and URM directors, but they are paid substantially more than their male and non-URM counterparts. We conclude that females and URM directors are chosen by larger firms with larger and more active boards (and higher base compensation), but are very rarely chosen to lead those boards. When they are chosen for board leadership positions, they are paid significantly more than their non-URM male peers. This result is more consistent with the “glass ceiling” hypothesis that appropriate candidates who add to the diversity of the board are scarce and command higher compensation.

Research shows that African-American women represent a small number of C-Suite positions in US Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 corporations. It appears that cracks are beginning to form in the glass ceiling. However, for African-American women, a barrier called the “Black Ceiling,” remains in place. Black women, who have made it, often are ending up in support positions, rather than the operational roles leading to CEO positions (McGirt, E. 2017). Research shows that having women on a company’s board of directors is associated with better financial performance, a better gender mix among senior managers and a link to greater financial results. According to Catalyst (2019), women made up 58% of all employees in the financial services industry between the years of 2007 and 2015. During that same period, women represented 48% of first/mid-level managers and 29% of executive/senior-level managers. Women of color, however, represented only 16.8% of first/mid-level managers and 4.8% of executive/senior-level managers. This research will examine how African-American women’s careers, in Mid-level and Senior-level management, have currently advanced in the financial services industry. What factors are helping African-American women experience career advancements/promotions, and, with minimal support, what would position them to be in the succession pipeline leading to the C-Suite level in the banking industry?

PurposeThis study aims to measure the gender wage gap among millennial workers in Colombia and determine if there is a marked wage difference between millennial women and men. Furthermore, this study analyzes whether millennial women face a glass ceiling, that is, whether there is a larger gender wage gap among workers earning relatively high wages.Design/methodology/approachThe study data included a sample of 2,144 millennial workers employed in 11 organizations located in the five main cities of Colombia. Oaxaca–Blinder econometric methods of wage decomposition were used to calculate both raw and adjusted gender wage gaps. The latter results in estimating the gender wage gap while controlling for observable characteristics related to individual, family, and labor. In addition, wage decompositions by education levels were carried out to approximate the extent of the glass ceiling among young workers.FindingsThe results show that millennial workers in Colombia face gender inequality in the labor market and that professional millennial women experience a distinct glass ceiling. The adjusted gender wage gap is 9.5%, and this gap increases with education level, increasing to nearly 14% among college-educated workers.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical results are supported by a self-report survey of millennial workers. An important limitation is that the data include millennial workers employed in the formal sector and exclude the informal sector (activities not regulated or protected by the state), which represents an important part of the economy in developing countries.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the empirical literature on gender wage inequality for younger workers. This paper is original in reviewing the gender pay gap in Colombia using a primary dataset. Most of the work in this area has been done in developed countries and this research adds to the findings that have had focused on those nations.

Japan implemented a model of catch-up development in the second half of the twentieth century, the success of which led to the economic “miracle”. In the 21st century these economies occupy confident positions on the world arena, leading global markets of goods, services, capital, highly qualified labor, knowledge, etc. Rapid economic modernization has led to the emergence of a unique institutional system based on a combination of traditional and modern institutions. The preservation of traditional institutions is facilitated by the rapid nature of modernization (Norton D., 1991). The patriarchal family is the main unit of society, which is aimed at the socio-economic policy of the state, which thus cements the gender specificity of the distribution of responsibilities between spouses (Stepanova, 2014, Rebrey 2019). In general, the development of gender studies and, as a consequence, gender awareness, as well as the level of gender inequality as a whole, vary in the studied economies, which makes them an excellent platform for conducting gender studies, namely testing the methodology for measuring gender inequality in developed economies. The author’s methodology is based on a neo-institutional approach, within which I introduce the concept of axial institutions - these are institutions that play a fundamental role in the formation and maintenance of moral and ethical standards and public views, as well as individual value systems and worldviews. Axial institutions include the institution of the family, education, the production of knowledge, the most influential and conservative institutions that are resistant to external influences. To achieve effectiveness, gender policy must be aimed at three axial institutions at the same time, otherwise their common desire for conservatism will resist external influences, which often leads to the opposite results: instead of improving the position of women, ineffective gender policies lead to a doubling of the burden: unpaid paid work is added to domestic work and parenting. The double burden of a woman leads to low productivity in the case of low-paying jobs and to the glass ceiling in the case of high-paying jobs. Ineffective gender policies also lead to female and child poverty, and can also undermine the foundations of marriage, making it too disadvantageous for women. On a macroeconomic scale, gender inequality leads to a decrease in economic growth, a decrease in the quality and diversity of the workforce, etc.

In today’s fast paced society managing Human resources has become a challenging yet dynamic and exciting task. Organizations have realized that human resources are their most unique and valuable assets. In this era where the world has become a global village educational institution are trying to keep pace with the competition by retaining key employees through reducing disparities, improving faculty effectiveness, morale and increasing developmental opportunities. Work Life balance is a delicate aspect that results in teacher satisfaction and effectiveness. It has been proved over the years that the balanced work life results in well-being of the faculties, students as well as the organization. Work life Imbalance affects the performance at work place on one side and family care on the other side. This can also create Glass ceiling resulting in lack of opportunities for career growth and development. Organizations are formulating polices and women themselves have adopted strategies to maintain work life balance and overcome glass ceiling. The present study is an attempt to understand the influence of socio-demographic factors on WLB among the faculties of the public universities in Karnataka. This study is based on the primary data. For this purpose, a survey was carried out among the university teachers of the Public universities of Karnataka. An attempt has been made to highlight the challenges faced by women in maintaining the work life balance in this sector.

In this paper, I compare two policy interventions used in Europe to increase gender equality on corporate boards: quota versus disclosure. While quota has a stronger enforcement effect, disclosure allows firms to decide on the optimal board gender ratio taking into consideration their own information. This information includes the friction that causes low female representation on boards. I show that it is important to separate supply and demand side frictions. In industries that have a low supply of female directors, quota leads firms to hire more foreign female directors, new female directors with no prior board experience, and more female directors with PhDs. In industries not constrained by female director supply, disclosure and quota can be equally effective in shattering the glass ceiling. Additionally, I find that effects are stronger in countries where there is a stronger social norm on gender equality. Last, I do not find this increase in board gender diversity leads to better financial performance.

Germany has a large persistent Gender Pay Gap of 21%; although this gap is not constant across occupations. The question arises why some occupations have large Gender Pay Gaps while others have only small gaps. Using data from the Structural Earnings Study merged with occupational task information provided by the Federal Labor Office, this paper aims to uncover the relationship between occupational characteristics and the Gender Pay Gap. To do so, I apply a two-step approach, where the first step uses individual characteristics to estimate the adjusted occupation-specific Gender Pay Gaps. In the second step, these gaps are regressed on occupational characteristics. I find that wage differences between men and women are lower in occupations with linear earnings and in occupations with a large share of public firms. Moreover, we observe that an increasing share of persons with supervisory power is linked to larger wage differences between men and women, which indicates the presence of a glass ceiling. Finally, the Gender Pay Gap is higher in occupations with routine tasks. Moreover, the findings suggest that the more that employees can be substituted with other employees, the lower is the Gender Pay Gap. Hence, this study extends previous findings on occupation-specific Gender Pay Gaps by linking them to occupational characteristics on a more general level.

In this paper we ask how the division of household labor varies across heterosexual dual-earner couples with different relative wages with a focus on differences between Southern and Western Europe. Using the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions we first show that high income married or cohabiting women do twice as much housework as single women in Southern Europe. Further, their time spent in household production relative to their spouses' time in Southern Europe is the same regardless of their relative wages, while in Western Europe we find positive elasticity of substitution in household production with respect to relative wages. We thus present positive evidence for the presence of a “second-shift” that women face in Southern Europe, which may stem from regional gender norms. Our findings hold after instrumenting for relative wages using the relative wages of similar socio-economic groups in other countries.

Women suffer from glass ceiling barriers to reaching CEO positions. We argue that the stock market reaction to CEO appointments constitutes a barrier that is external to the firm and that is important to understand because investors can influence appointment decisions by buying or selling stocks. We build a trading experiment to causally identify the role of preferences, and we find evidence of gender homophily among participants. When a female CEO is appointed, female participants buy stocks, while male participants sell stocks. The opposite holds when a male CEO is appointed. This behavioral trait combined with the lack of gender diversity in the stock market can explain both the negative stock market reaction to female CEO appointments and the underrepresentation of female CEOs.

Extensive research on the glass ceiling has shown that the large gap between the female representation at lower and upper levels of management is largely driven by differences in family responsibilities, career interruptions and the requirement of working long hours. Additionally, recent data suggests that female entrepreneurial activity lags behind that of males in terms of business creation and revenue generation. Though one might expect female entrepreneurs to bypass the glass ceiling constraints when becoming a business owner, research still documents gender gaps in this market. This paper examines whether the traditional glass ceiling inhibitors apply to female entrepreneurs as well. We find that male and female entrepreneurs reach early levels of success at similar rates and have similar aspirations for financial growth. However, we find that female entrepreneurs are more likely to cite flexibility as an important reason for entering entrepreneurship and spend more time on housekeeping and childcare.

In this paper, we use event studies to estimate the effects of changes to a public firm's board of trustees on stock returns. The goal is to determine whether the gender of an incoming board member is perceived differently by investors. Scholarly findings on gender and leadership have been mixed at best. Overall, the evidence seems to indicate that women and men in comparable leadership positions are much more alike than different. Yet, the number of women in leadership positions in the United States (and globally) is still disproportionately low-a phenomenon known as the "glass ceiling." Our study shows that women and men, at least in the United States, are still not created equal in the eyes of investors. Using BoardEx data on the composition of U.S. public firm boards for 1992-2017, we find that changes to a firm's board are consistently perceived as a negative information shock by investors, but the effect of incoming female board members is more than twice as negative as than of male counterparts.

We analyze a setting in which a board must hire a CEO after exerting effort to learn about the quality of each candidate. Optimal effort is asymmetric, implying asymmetric likelihoods of each candidate being chosen. If the board has a bias in favor of one candidate, it selects an effort allocation that maximizes the likelihood of that candidate being chosen. Surprisingly, this is still often true even when the board's prior is that its preferred candidate is inferior. A glass ceiling can also arise, in which the tendency to hire favored candidates increases as the importance of the position increases.

English Abstract: Gender discrimination is one of the greatest challenges faced by modern society. This paper focuses on positive action measures and, particularly, gender quotas, as tools aimed at breaking the so-called glass ceiling, assessing how this kind of measures have crystalized in our legal order. It also reflects on the delicate balance between the principle of equality and positive action, a thorny issue that has been addressed by our courts of law amidst great controversy. Likewise, it analyzes the different measures and policies implemented at national and European level in breaking the glass ceiling measuring their success in fostering gender balance in corporate boards. Spanish Abstract: La discriminacion de genero es uno de los grandes retos a los que se enfrenta nuestra sociedad. Este ensayo se centra en las medidas de accion positiva y, en particular, las cuotas de genero, como instrumentos dirigidos a romper el llamado techo de cristal, analizando como este tipo de medidas han cristalizado en nuestro ordenamiento juridico. Tambien reflexiona sobre el dificil equilibrio entre el principio de igualdad y la accion positiva, espinosa cuestion que ha sido abordada por nuestros tribunales con gran controversia. Asimismo, analiza las distintas medidas y politicas implementadas a nivel nacional y europeo con el objetivo de romper el techo de cristal, midiendo el exito de las mismas en promover la igualdad de genero en los consejos de administracion.

Gender and the Tournament: Reinventing Antidiscrimination Law in the Age of Inequality, by Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit, offers a new account of the glass ceiling, connecting the phenomenon with shoddy corporate governance and rising income inequality in general. This Response asks some preliminary questions about the risks and rewards of Gender and the Tournament’s project for feminists. It concludes that feminists should take seriously the article’s call for a reinvigoration of disparate impact law, particularly considering the severe limitations of other Title VII theories in promoting sex equality in the workplace. Gender and the Tournament’s critical examination of the connections between destructive competition, growing income inequality, and women’s disadvantage in the workforce may have rewards for feminists in linking sex equality with progressive economic causes. But it also poses risks. This Response identifies two. First, the Article’s critique of the new economy’s tournament mentality may lack appeal for those men and women who love the competition and cannot envision a satisfactory way to restructure the labor market. Second, the argument that toxic competition is intrinsically gendered might be mistaken for the one that women are intrinsically uninterested in (and no good at) competition. This Response therefore urges feminists not to give up on challenging the double standards, double binds, and sex stereotypes that confront ambitious women, in addition to the disparate-impact strategies suggested by Gender and the Tournament.

This paper investigates whether personality traits can explain glass ceilings (increasing gender wage gaps across the wage distribution). Using longitudinal survey data from Germany, the UK, and Australia, I combine unconditional quantile regressions with wage gap decompositions to identify the effect of personality traits on wage gaps. The results suggest that the impact of personality traits on wage gaps increases across the wage distribution in all countries. Personality traits explain up to 14.5% of the overall gender wage gap. However, controlling for personality traits does not lead to a significant reduction of unexplained wage gaps in most cases.

Using a 40-year panel of all public school teachers and principals in New York State, we explore how female principals affect rates of teacher turnover—an important determinant of school quality. We find that male teachers are about 12% more likely to leave their schools when they work under female principals than under male principals. In contrast, we find no such effects for female teachers. Furthermore, when male teachers request transfers, they are more likely to be to schools with male principals. These results suggest that opposition from male subordinates could inhibit female progress in leadership.

Using a two-stage decomposition technique, this paper analyzes the role of occupational segregation in explaining the probability of women vis-a-vis men of finding high-paying jobs over the life-cycle. Jobs are classified as highly-remunerated if their compensation exceeds a threshold, which is set at different values to span the entire wage distribution. Results obtained from pooled CPS surveys indicate that the importance of occupational segregation remains virtually unchanged over the life-cycle for low- and middle-wage workers. However, women's access to high-paying occupations becomes significantly more restricted as workers age, suggesting a previously undocumented type of `glass ceiling' in the U.S.

Women’s ascent to leadership positions and authority in organizations and society is limited by social norms, organizational cultures, and structures collectively referred to as ‘the glass ceiling’. The society views leaderships and authority as exclusive reserves on men. The result of the domination is a male paradigm is that women leaders are out of place in foreign territory, ``travellers in a male world'. The model of the leadership has traditionally been masculine and, while these stereotypes remain, they succeed in perpetuating the dominant place for men in management. The paper investigated issues concerning female’s participation in senior management in organizational settings and the glass ceiling that affects their career. It also explored the visible and invisible barriers that have kept women from reaching upper levels of leadership. Drawing heavily on historical and secondary data, the paper reviews the trends of career barriers, glass ceilings and proffered suggestions to eliminate these barriers towards development of the women folks and identifies areas for further research and highlights points of consideration for management of institutions.

Gender equality on boards is a global and highly politicized issue. To this day, there is considerable cross-country variation in female board representation. We examine institutional supply- and demand-side factors associated with this issue. Our results indicate that a societal climate of gender equality contributes to more women on boards, mainly through fostering the supply of suitable candidates. Therefore, the glass ceiling should be improved through a societal supply-side effort which needs to complement demand-side (quota) regulation.

The following research study has been designed in order to investigate an important issue “The Glass Ceiling effect” which still prevails in many organizations in Sri Lanka. The banking sector which is a very vibrant industry in Sri Lanka has been selected to conduct the analysis. The core objective of this study is to identify the barriers which prevail and have an impact on women participation in senior management positions in licensed commercial banks in relationship with organizational performance. The research has conducted by taking in to account 9 domestic licensed commercial banks in Sri Lanka. Thus both secondary as well as a primary research has conducted in order to critically analyze the “Glass Ceiling Effect” in banking sector in Sri Lanka. Secondary data analyzing has addressed two objectives to identify the challenges in acquiring skills and challenges in women participation in upper management. The research findings showed that there are 9% of females in director board, 16% females in corporate management and 13% females as the management team. In overall perspective the research highlighted that there are 13% of female participants in the managerial positions in banks. According to the primary research which was conducted, the level of women participation was identified in-terms of organizational performance. Thus questionnaire findings showed a moderate level of perception about women participation in the banking sector. Finally a series of quality solutions were recommended in order to eliminate the “Glass Ceiling Effects” in the banking industry.

This paper examines the gender wage gaps along the wage distribution in Egypt using individual data from the labor market panel surveys 1998, 2006 and 2012 and a quantile regression approach. Results show that in average female’s hourly wage is significantly less than that of males. While the wage gap in average is in favor of men it is decreasing with time and with education. Across quantiles the effect of being a female on hourly wages is negative, however this gap is higher at the lower and highest quantiles as compared to the middle ones. Indicating the presence of glass ceiling as well as sticky floors. Results also showed that household characteristics and location matter for the gap at higher quintile i.e. for the glass ceiling phenomena while the gap at the lower quantiles i.e. the sticky floor could be attributed to other unobservable related to location and social context. In societies like Egypt social context may enable males to compete better in the labor market. Hence resulting in women being paid less. Thus, key policy options must include not simply the usual policies to improve women’s productivity but policies that promote gender equity in hiring, and in the workplace. Moreover, policy options need to be extended out of the labor market and into the household to help women overcome unobservable that trap them in low-paying jobs.

Leadership selection often requires candidates to actively choose to express their interest. Using a series of incentivized experiments with more than 1000 participants, we compare such an Opt-in mechanism with an Opt-out mechanism where everyone qualified for the position is in the candidate pool by default, but individuals can choose to opt out of the selection process. The results reveal a gender gap in participation decisions under the Opt-in mechanism. The gender gap exists even when individuals know they are the top performers, suggesting helping women improve their performance may not necessarily reduce gender gaps. Importantly, women are more likely to participate under the Opt-out mechanism and gender gaps in leadership selection are reduced.

The Italian gender wage gap is lower than in other European countries, however it increased during the 2008-2012 economic crisis, while in most countries it decreased. This paper finds that the main cause of this increase is the 2010-11 public sector wage freeze, which was introduced as an austerity measure by the Italian government. We estimate the level of the gender wage gap as if the wage freeze had not been implemented, applying a counterfactual analysis. We find that the wage freeze accounts for more than 100% of the increase of the wage gap, while other factors in sum reduced the wage gap. The paper also examines the evolution of the gap from 2004 to 2012 using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and a quantile decomposition. The gender wage gap is found to be unexplained by observed characteristics. After 2010 it is particularly high in the upper part of the wage distribution, indicating the existence of a glass ceiling in addition to a sticky floor.

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the relations between CEO gender, power and bank performance. First, this study examines the relation between CEO gender and power. Do female CEOs possess less power than male CEOs? As women reach the top, do they hold similar or even higher levels of power as men? Second, this study investigates the relation between the CEO gender and bank performance. How do female CEOs perform? Is the relation between gender and performance subject to CEO power?Design/methodology/approachThis study uses the following three performance measures: ROA, pre-tax ROA and pre-provision profit over assets. This study follows Finkelstein’s (1992) classifications and adopt five variables to measure the four dimensions of CEO power: duality and compensation share measure structural power; ownership captures ownership power; number of functional areas measures the power of expertise; and elite education captures prestige power. Logit model, ordinary least squares regression and quantile regression methods are used in the analysis.FindingsIn a sample of Chinese banks, female CEOs are found to have similar power and performance as male CEOs. As women reach the top, they hold higher ownership and greater prestige power than men. Female CEOs even outperform male CEOs in non-state dominated banks. Female CEOs show their impact through their power: those with higher compensation shares or greater power are positively related to bank performance.Originality/valueOverall, the results show that as women reach the top, they hold a higher level of power than men. As females break through the glass ceiling, they perform better than males. Moreover, female CEOs show their impact through their power. Female CEOs who overcome the barriers are less traditional and more self-directed than their peers.

In the recent research on top incomes, there has been little discussion of gender. How many of the top 1 and 10 per cent are women? A great deal is known about gender differentials in earnings, but how far does this carry over to the distribution of total incomes, bringing self employment and capital income into the picture? We investigate the gender divide at the top of the income distribution using tax record data for a sample of eight countries with individual taxation. We show that women are under-represented at the top of the distribution. They account for between a fifth and a third of those in the top 10 per cent. Higher up the income distribution, the proportion is lower, with women constituting between 14 and 22 per cent of the top 1 per cent. The presence of women in the top income groups has generally increased over time, but the rise becomes smaller at the very top. As a result, the gradient with income has become more marked: the under-representation of women today increases more sharply. Examination of the shape of the income distribution by fitting a Pareto distribution shows that at the end of the period women disappear faster than men as one moves up the income scale in all countries. In this sense, there appears to be something of a “glass ceiling” for women. In the case of Canada, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand, there appears to have been a reversal over time, with the slope of the upper tail having been steeper for women in the past. In seeking to explain this, we highlight the role of income composition, where we show that there have been significant changes over time, underlining the fact that it is not sufficient to look only at earned income.

The paper looks at the extent of gender and caste-based discrimination in the formal and informal labour markets in India using the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) Employment-Unemployment Survey (EUS) data for the four major rounds from 1999-00 to 2011-12. The study finds gender wage gaps to be significantly higher in the informal economy - a major part of which is attributable to discrimination effect. In sharp contrast, it is mainly the endowment effect which is responsible for the gender wage gaps in the formal economy. Caste-based wage gaps are found to be significantly lower in the informal economy and are attributable mainly to the endowment effect. Although caste-based wage gaps are positive in the formal economy, caste-based wage discrimination works the other way round in the formal economy with SC/ST workers getting a higher return to their endowments compared to the OBC/General workers. The quantile decomposition results for gender shows the presence of a sticky floor effect in both the formal and the informal economy whereas in case of caste-based discrimination, we find evidence of a glass ceiling effect in the informal economy and a U-shaped pattern in the formal economy.

Minority and female directors earn significantly lower compensation than their peers serving within the same board despite having superior qualifications and receiving higher vote totals in director elections. This lower compensation is partially a function of board responsibilities. Although diverse directors are more likely to serve on certain committees (except the compensation committee), they are less likely to serve in key leadership positions associated with greater pay. Moreover, they earn less income beyond the formulaic components of director compensation. Female and minority representation on the director compensation committee and the existence of a board diversity policy attenuates this effect.

The obstacles that lead to the under-representation of women in leadership and upper level management positions are commonly described in scholarly works and the media as glass ceilings (Barreto et al., 2009; McLeod, 2008; Weyer, 2007). The term glass ceiling was used basically in corporate field as the Wall Street Journal promoted this issue in March 1986. It described conflict that arose when qualified women were denied higher positions in corporate ladder and did not get equally paid for similar types of work. There is a strong need for ongoing investigations into the causes and consequences of glass ceilings. Women around the world have been moving steadily into occupations, professions and managerial jobs previously reserved for men. Their access to education and training continues to improve, providing many with the necessary qualifications to aspire to jobs in senior management. The present study is concerned with critical evaluation of gender discrimination and glass ceiling effect. The purpose of the present study is to identify the variables which play a vital role in glass ceiling effect based on gender. The study primarily focuses on gender difference/glass ceiling effect in case of Universities with special reference to Indian vs International Universities in Dubai.

תקציר בעברית: חוקרים, ובמיוחד אנתרופולוגים, נוטים להתמקד בגורמים שבשדה מחקרם ולהחמיץ השפעות קונטקסטואליות. במחקרי "תקרת הזכוכית" העוסקים בקידום נשים, הוחמצה השפעת הקונטקסט של מנהיגויות ותיקות בשלבן הסופי. לפי תיאוריית מחזור חיי מנהיגות זהו שלב אי-היעילות השמרני שהוא אוליגרכי ולא פעם ממושך (Michels, 1959, 1915). בשלב זה, חסרים למנהיגים הישגים וחידושים שמזכים אותם באמון המונהגים ומשום כך, הם מגנים על כוחם ועל מעמדם בעיקר ע"י מתן קידום והטבות לנאמניהם וע"י דיכוי מבקריהם וחדשנים מצליחים העלולים/עשויים לרשתם. הקונטקסט של מנהיגות גברית כזו מעודד בכל דרג העדפת קשרים על כישורים, ומחזק את "תקרת הזכוכית" המגבילה קידום נשים כישרוניות, יעילות וחדשניות. נשים בודדות הידועות בספרות המגדר כ“מלכות דבורים” וכ”אסימונים” (Kanter, 1977) מקודמות לצמרת בשל נאמנותן למנהיג ולשמרנותו האוליגרכית והפטריארכלית. הטענה היא שמחקרי מגדר לא הבחינו בהשפעה השלילית של קונטקסט כזה על השוויון המגדרי. מקרה מבחן של הקיבוץ כחברה רדיקלית בניסיונה ליצור שוויון חברתי, ידגים ויסביר החמצה זו. מסקנת המאמר היא שחיוני למחקרי מגדר להתייחס להשפעת הקונטקסט של מנהיגויות גבריות בשלבן הסופי של אי-יעילות שמרנית אוליגרכית.English Abstract: Egalitarian kibbutzin (pl. of kibbutz) never practiced gender equality. Current explanations have missed the main cause: men’s monopolization of powerful tenured executive offices of hundreds of hierarchic inter-kibbutz organizations (hereafter: IKOs). Irreplaceable heads of major IKOs became hegemonic by presiding over thousands of privileged male loyalist functionaries who accumulated power and intangible capitals in IKO jobs while violating the rotatzia (job rotation) norm which weakened kibbutz managers. Many such functionaries became local informal kibbutz rulers who promoted only males to short-term managerial jobs which were springboards to tenured lucrative IKO jobs. A few women were coopted and promoted as “tokens” (Kanter, 1977) to camouflage inequality. Israeli feminism did not change this due to brain-drain of talented radical women and because kibbutz feminists failed targeting the prime cause of inferiority. The proposed alternative research paradigm for the canonic one can overcome this mistake.

We increasingly hear that empowering women and placing them in positions of leadership will lead to a safer, more prosperous world. The UN Security Council’s groundbreaking resolutions on Women Peace, and Security (WPS) — and U.S. law implementing these commitments — rest on the assumption that women’s participation in peace and security matters will lead to more sustainable peace, because women presumably “perform” in ways that reduce conflict, violence, and extremism. This idea is of heightened importance today because women are still vastly underrepresented in positions of leadership in the peace and security field, having yet to “shatter that highest and hardest glass ceiling” as Commander-in-Chief in the United States or rise to the role of Secretary-General in the United Nations. Before her own historic race to become the first woman Commander in Chief, Hillary Clinton had prominently made the claim we increasingly hear that women’s empowerment is not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do for global and economic security. Such claims raise fundamental questions for international law, equality theory, and feminism. Assertions that the world would be a better — more peaceful, more prosperous — place, if women assumed leadership positions in peace and security matters are unapologetically instrumentalist and reinforce essentialist views of women. At the same time, evidence suggests that these claims are to some extent accurate. Thus, these assertions should be carefully examined. Reviewing new research, this Article argues that while some evidence supports these claims, the statistical evidence supporting these claims suffers from methodological flaws. Moreover, the forms of gender performance reflected in the data — which international law has organized itself around — are based on the socially constructed roles women play as caregivers, nurturers, and collaborators, not necessarily on their inherent biological roles. Yet, international law reifies these roles and the stereotypes that surround them, even as it tries to open up opportunities for women beyond traditional sex-segregated positions that have long relegated women around the world to the pink ghetto of economic inequality and inferior political and social status. Having to maneuver around formal equality, on the one hand, and instrumentalist claims that women will “save” the world, on the other, means that the category of “woman” can restrict even as it liberates. After all, not all women are “peace-loving,” particularly in a world where the women who succeed are often those who can succeed on terms defined by men.Two prevailing theoretical frameworks — antisubordination and securitization—shape the current debate about WPS, but each ultimately falls short. This Article identifies democratic legitimacy as a novel third approach missing from the existing debate. As an alternative view, the democratic legitimacy account effectively reframes the WPS debate as one concerning inclusive security — emphasizing that women’s participation enhances the representativeness, democracy, and fairness of the process as a whole — rather than privileging the “special interests” of a particular group (as the antisubordination approach is accused of doing) or reinforcing gender essentialism (as the securitization approach does). Notably, a democratic legitimation paradigm is grounded in a model of inclusion that can be applied to vectors of inequality beyond gender, as well as to inequality at the intersection of various forms of inequality. Moreover, by emphasizing democratic representation, this approach insists on local ownership and bottom-up solutions, thereby emphasizing participation and leadership by women in conflict zones, rather than female global elites. Under a democratic legitimacy paradigm, women can still “save” the world, but in a different way than the predominant discourse would have us believe.

Today, women account for 50% of graduates from university programs in Canada and abroad. Traditional gender roles are a growing “thing of the past” with women taking on more responsibility and leadership positions within law and business. However, a gap still remains between the sexes in partner track and directorships. This paper explores regulatory bodies, both in law and finance, which have voiced for change and sparked conversation to bridge this gap. As one will find, major successes have occurred in recent years, however a commitment must be maintained in order to continue to advance gender diversity in law and business.

This research intends to explore the existence and concept of glass ceiling in Pakistan. As it is widely cited that glass ceiling refers to the position one wants to achieve and is reachable yet he/she is deprived of that position due to some discriminatory effect. Generally the deprived are the obvious minorities and most certainly the women of society in context with the corporate world. But the emerging role of women as companies CEOs, policy makers and department heads of various companies in Pakistan motivates this study to find whether it is really gender discrimination being tagged as glass ceiling in Pakistan or is it mere perception leading us away from actual facts.

After 20 years of structural and policy supports in Australia, when women continue to aspire for leadership positions in both the public and private sectors, it necessitates revisiting the challenges that they still face in developing successful careers. This paper has critically examined two stands in the contemporary feminism in relation to female career development and leadership inequality in the 21st century, that is - the argument that in the changed societal context choice leads women to have differential paid and unpaid work orientations and thus, female career development up to the leadership level of roles is more of an outcome of choice or preference based on their internal psycho-social issues; and, the counter-argument that is, the structure of opportunity and the environmental variables still have significant impacts in female career development as organisations are not entirely gender equal to provide women with unrestricted choices. Then it has developed a psycho-social career development model which predicts the career development process of the 21st century modern women by identifying the primary impacting factors and their inter-relationships. As many of the traditional barriers are gone today this framework has given equal emphasis on the dynamic effects of both the psycho-social variables and the environmental constraints on female employment patterns to analyse the persisting leadership inequality in modern societies like Australia.

The literature underlines the low number of women in management as one of the main indicators of gender discrimination in labor market. This paper investigates the cross-country differences in the percentage of women in senior management. The results show that women are more represented in senior management in developing countries than in “liberal western democracies”. Women also participate more in senior management in countries in which prejudice and discrimination against women are larger. Two economic explanations for these puzzling results are proposed: the weak functioning of the legal system and the large size of shadow economy. The paper provides empirical evidence that is consistent with these explanations.

This Article shows that women are found in dramatically low numbers on the benches of the majority of the world’s most important international courts, analyzes the causes of this phenomenon and proposes and evaluates solutions. It establishes that the number of women in the pool of potential judges does not appear to dictate how many women become international judges. It shows, too, that when selection procedures are closed and opaque, and there is no quota or aspirational target for a sex-balanced bench, women obtain international judgeships in disproportionately low numbers. On the other hand, when a quota or aspirational target exists, benches are more balanced. Finally, the Article suggests and evaluates concrete reforms to selection procedures on international courts to remedy this problem, including greater transparency and openness in selection procedures, aspirational targets for the participation of women on the bench and quotas. It is the first article to explore the relationship between selection procedures and sex representativeness outcomes on international courts.

Using the India Human Development Survey data for 2004-05, we employ two methodologies to estimate the earnings structure of household nonfarm businesses owned by Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SCSTs) and non-SCSTs: OLS estimation of mean earnings, and quantile regressions. Correspondingly, we use two decomposition methods: the conventional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition and Melly’s (2006) refinement of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition of quantile gaps. We find clear differences in characteristics between SCST-owned and non-SCST owned businesses. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition reveals that depending on the specification of explanatory variables, as much as 70 percent of the earnings gap could be attributed to the "unexplained" or the discriminatory component. Quantile regressions reveal that gaps are higher at lower deciles than the higher ones (both raw gaps, as well as after controlling for characteristics), and the decompositions show that the unexplained component is higher at the lower deciles than higher, suggesting that SCST-owned businesses at the lower end of the conditional distribution face greater discrimination, as compared to those at the higher end. Thus, we find strong evidence of a "sticky floor", a phenomenon observed for gender wage gaps in developing countries (in contrast to a "glass ceiling" in developed countries).

In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members.

The Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 changed the Higher Education system in the UK by giving all polytechnics university status. Using the British Household Panel Survey and accounting for different sources of selection bias, we show that wage differentials between university and polytechnic graduates can be explained by a glass ceiling preventing polytechnic graduates from reaching professional occupations. After the reform, the glass ceiling disappeared and average wages of post-reform polytechnic graduates are not statistically different from average wages of post-reform graduates of traditional universities any more. This implies that the abolition of the 'two-tier' education system has reduced inequality among Higher Education graduates – a result that may be desirable in other systems of a 'two-tier' nature.

Women and ethnic minority groups hold few boardroom positions. In this paper, we adopt a novel identification strategy to test whether this is caused by a lack of suitable candidates for director positions or, alternatively, by discriminatory barriers that prevent these groups from progressing up the corporate hierarchy. We study the determinants of director appointments following completed mergers and acquisitions. Since directors at the acquisition target will be considered for an appointment at the newly merged firm, our approach allows us to observe the characteristics of successfully appointed target directors jointly with the characteristics of directors who have not been appointed to the board of the merged firm. Our results show empirical evidence consistent with biases in the recruitment of directors. We find that Hispanic directors are less likely to be appointed to the board of the merged firm. Further, women are less likely to be appointed if they previously held a non-executive post and if the representation of women on the acquiring firm’s board is higher. We also find that powerful CEOs are more prone to appoint women to the board. These effects cannot be explained by director and deal characteristics.

Women are still a minority in the audit profession, especially at the partner level. An increasing amount of literature has explored the sources of this gender inequality. Past studies have, however, neglected the possibility that the processes that lead to the (re)production of gender differences and hierarchies may differ between audit firms of different sizes. In this article, we combine quantitative with qualitative data to explore how gender inequalities regarding promotion and access to resources of power (at the partner level) might differ between audit firms of different sizes. Our data show that women who achieve partnership in large firms (but not in some smaller firms) are confronted with a second-level glass ceiling, as they do not play leading roles within their firms. This can be explained by the higher demands of commitment large firms place upon (prospective) partners and these firms’ greater focus on the commercial side of auditing.

This paper aims to fill the void in legal research on the experiences of Asian American women. This paper is limited in its scope and focuses specifically on the experiences of middle-class, educated, Asian American women. It also focuses on societal forces that create barriers to success for Asian American women, such as stereotyping. Asian Americans are not a monolithic group. They are from different countries with distinct histories, and differ in language, culture, food, and religion. Nevertheless, our dominant society often mistakes all Asian Americans as being members of a monolithic group. For that reason, my paper focuses specifically on external forces creating barriers to success. In Part II, I discuss the exclusion of Asian American women in the "glass ceiling" and the "bamboo ceiling." In Part III, I discuss the study of intersectionality, its limitations, and potential to discuss the barriers to success for Asian American women. In order to fully understand the barriers to success for Asian American women, I examine the history of exclusion, stereotypes, and discrimination of Asian American women in Part IV. I will also discuss the model minority myth and how Asian American women fit into this narrative. I will conclude this paper with a discussion on ways to remove these barriers to success and acknowledge the experiences of Asian American women.

This paper investigates wage differentials between immigrants and natives in Italy along the entire wage distribution and try to account for them using information on observed characteristic of both populations. Analyses are based on data from the 2009 survey on "Income and Living Conditions of Households with Foreigners", the first nation-wide survey aimed at obtaining information on the socio-economic conditions of the foreign population living in Italy, and on the Italian sample of EU-SILC. Immigrants wage gap is disentangled according to three main dimensions: gender, immigrants length of stay in Italy and Italian language proficiency. We show the existence in the Italian labour market of a large wage differential between immigrants and natives which increases along the wage distribution suggesting the existence of a "glass ceiling effect" for immigrants workers. Moreover, we find evidence of (i) a large gender difference in the observed gap, with women showing a higher gap than men, (ii) an ongoing but largely incomplete as similation process among the immigrant population and (iii) a lower gap for immigrants with higher language proficiency. Quantile regressions, Blinder-Oaxaca and Machado-Mata decompositions are applied. The counterfactual decomposition shows that individual characteristics account for only a small fraction of total observed differentials, sector controls increase the explained portion but do not account for the "glass ceiling" pattern of the gap, which instead disappears with occupation controls, suggesting that the upward-sloping shape of the (log) wage differential is a symptom of the occupational segregation characterizing the immigrant population in the Italian labour market.

While the glass ceiling remains a prevailing phenomenon in the Romanian public administration, there are a few examples of female managers that overcame this invisible barrier. As such, it would be recommended to scrutinize these success stories in order to observe what are the limitations and the requirements for female managers to shatter the glass ceiling.Going beyond a simple theoretical review, this paper also presents the results of a pilot study conducted in 2010 regarding Romanian public institutions. The main barriers, as well as the perceived strengths, qualities, abilities and skills of female managers that succeeded in the public sphere are taken into account. Although the sample size is rather small, it is consistent with the requirements of such studies and includes respondents from the local public administration, decentralized institutions, educational facilities (both university and pre-university), the judicial system and from the national level (parliament and national agencies). Furthermore, the data collection instrument (questionnaire) consists of quantitative and qualitative items, thus offering a comprehensive picture as both statistical and qualitative analyses were conducted.The main findings of this study can be regarded as guidelines (which need to be contextually adapted) for females from both the public and private sector that have set their minds on reaching the upper organizational levels.