Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Do Women Help Women?

In a study on workplace hierarchies using private sector data, Astrid Kunze, together with Amalia Miller, has examined 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, including unusually detailed job information for each worker, the researchers were able to define seven hierarchical ranks that are consistent across establishments and over time in order to measure promotions (defined as year-to-year rank increases) even for individuals who change employers. Their first finding is 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 lower ranks.

Ms Kunze's current research focuses on gender differences in job search, on labour market outcomes and family policies as well as on gender differences in careers in private sector plants. Her overall research focuses on Applied Microeconometrics, Labour Economics and Public Finance.

Astrid Kunze is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MSc from the University of Bielefeld. Previous employment includes Bayer AG Leverkusen as trainee in a business programme and IZA as a post-doc. Her research has been published in Empirical Economics, Labour Economics, Oxford Review of Economics Policy and Scandinavian Journal of Economics, among others.