Good-bye Glass Ceiling?

Good-bye Glass Ceiling?

"The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs" by Marianne Bertrand and Kevin F. Hallock, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review (Oct. 2001), 201 ILR Research Bldg., Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y. 14853–3901.

Share:
Read Time:
1m 55sec

"The Gender Gap in Top Corporate Jobs" by Marianne Bertrand and Kevin F. Hallock, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review (Oct. 2001), 201 ILR Research Bldg., Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y. 14853–3901.

There are more cracks in the corporate glass ceiling than most social commentators have noticed, and pay equity is now pretty well established in the executive suites, the authors of this statistical study of 1,500 companies conclude. That’s the good news. The bad news is that women occupy less than four percent of the top jobs in corporate America—though that percentage tripled in a recent five-year period.

In what they describe as "the first detailed description of the relative position of female top executives in the 1990s," the authors found a lot of change. Only 5.4 percent of the firms studied had a woman among their top five executives in 1992; five years later, 15 percent did. The pay gap shrank: Women earned 52 percent as much as men in 1993, but 73 percent in 1997.

Pay gap? Yes, there is one—the women in this study earned $900,000 on average in 1997, while the men pocketed $1.3 million. But the gap is not quite what it appears to be, according to the authors. (Both are economists, Bertrand at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, Hallock at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.) It’s explained by several different factors. Most notably, women were most underrepresented in the biggest corporations, which also offer the biggest pay packages. The women in the study were also five years younger than the men, on average, and were less likely to occupy one of the top four positions.

Accounting for those differences, the authors find that "the unexplained gender compensation gap for top executives was less than five percent." There’s no evidence of a "taste for discrimination against women," which is still not the same as saying there’s perfect equality.

The most salient questions now, say Bertand and Hallock, are these: what distinguishes companies that do promote women to top jobs from those that don’t? And why do women fare relatively well in smaller corporations while they’re "virtually absent from the ‘very top’ of the U.S. corporate world"?

More From This Issue