Agents of Change or Cogs in the Machine? Reexamining the Influence of Female Managers on the Gender Wage Gap

Abstract

Do female managers act in ways that narrow, or instead act in ways that preserve or even widen, the gender wage gap? Although conceptual arguments exist on both sides of this debate, the empirical evidence to date has favored the former view. Yet this evidence comes primarily from cross-establishment surveys, which do not provide visibility into individual managers' choices. Using longitudinal personnel records from an information services firm in which managers had considerable discretion over employee salaries, we estimate multilevel models that indicate no support for the proposition that female managers reduce the gender wage gap among their subordinates. Consistent with the theory of value threat, we instead find conditional support for the cogs-in-the-machine perspective: In the subsample of high performing supervisors and low performing employees, women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch.

Bending the Pipeline? Executive Search and Gender Inequality in Hiring for Top Management Jobs

“…1998;Carli and Eagly 2001;Eagly and Carli 2007). There is also a lively debate over whether women differ from men in positions of authority (Adams and Funk 2012), and whether having females in leadership positions affects firm performance (Herring 2009;Ahern and Dittmar 2012;Dezso and Ross 2012), management behavior (e.g., Matsa and Miller 2013), or the gender distribution of rewards and resources within firms (Cohen and Huffman 2007;Cardoso and Winter-Ebmer 2010;Kurtulus and Tomaskovic-Devey 2012;Shin 2012;Srivastava and Sherman 2015). Although far from resolved, these issues have garnered increasing attention in policy circles (see e.g.…”

Management gender composition and the gender pay gap: Evidence from British panel data

“…Analyses are often based on data from only one workplace or organization. Penner, Toro‐Tulla, and Huffman (), for example, study establishments within a single grocery retailer; Abraham () uses data from multiple branches in one financial services firm; Hedija () and Hedija (), respectively, study two and one hospital, and Srivastava and Sherman () look into a single financial services firm.…”

How do Entrepreneurial Bosses Influence their Employees’ Future Entrepreneurship Choices?

“…Negative spillovers from female leaders have also been documented. Women in higher ranks may instead act as "queen bees" and intentionally hinder the career progress of female workers in lower levels of the job ladder (Bednar and Gicheva, 2014;Maume, 2011;Srivastava and Sherman, 2015). Artz and Taengnoi (2016) for example find that women report lower levels of job satisfaction when their supervisor is also a woman.…”

“…Female employees may be induced to leave organizations to a higher extent than men when the entrepreneurial boss is also female, due to limited career advancement opportunities and discrimination (Buttner and Moore, 1997;Hughes, 2003). If female entrepreneurial bosses act as "queen bees" in the organization and favor male over female workers (Lyness and Heilman, 2006;Maume, 2001;Bagues and Esteve-Volart, 2010;Srivastava and Sherman, 2015), female employees might decide to leave and eventually enter entrepreneurship, to escape from situations of wage inequality, increased risk of displacement, or dissatisfaction with the current boss. In this case, the impact of the (same-gender) boss on the employee's choice for entrepreneurship takes place primarily in the employee's exit decision.…”

“…Given that we are analyzing newly founded small ventures where the entrepreneurial boss is also the employer, we believe that the so-called "queen bee" syndrome (e.g., Hughes, 2003;Maume, 2001;Srivastava and Sherman, 2015) may be less relevant than it could be in larger organizations, where female leaders may not have a direct role in recruitment. Even so we investigate the (direct and indirect) influence of female bosses in employees' exit decision, by testing whether female employees with female entrepreneurial bosses end up in more disadvantaged positions (relative to their male counterparts) than female employees with a male boss.…”