Schmoozing And The Gender Gap
If you look at entry-level jobs in American corporations, roughly half are done by women, half done by men. But as you go higher and higher up the corporate ladder, the share of jobs held by women gets smaller. Only about 20 percent of senior executives are women, and fewer than 10 percent of CEOs.
One possible explanation for why women don't get promoted is the boys' club hypothesis: which is that at the office, men have more access to socializing and networking opportunities with the more powerful men who run the companies and then promote them.
There's a fascinating new working paper from economists Zoe Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia that tests whether the boys' club hypothesis actually applies — and, crucially, how it works. They used four years of detailed data from a large, anonymous bank, and what they found is that male employees assigned to male managers were promoted faster than male employees assigned to female managers, whereas female employees had the same career results regardless of their managers' gender.
On The Indicator, we chat with Zoe Cullen about this intriguing new research and its implications for a post-pandemic world, when a lot more people work from home and those schmoozing or networking opportunities go away, or at least look different than before.
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