Where do females rise to leadership positions? A cross-sector analysis

ABSTRACT

Gender equality in the workplace includes equal wages, opportunities, and treatment. Although there have been improvements in all of these areas in the last several decades, one area of continuing concern is the low proportion of women in business leadership positions, particularly as CEOs or business owners. We use a unique dataset from all California business establishments across all sectors and sizes to examine the factors that influence gender inequality in business leadership positions. We find that females are less likely to lead firms that are larger and higher performing across almost all industries. In addition, evidence shows that women lead firms that are less stable, supporting the existence of a glass cliff.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender inequality
• glass cliff
• firm performance
• business leaders

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• J71
• M12

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Donald W. Walls and the CSULB Summer Student Research Assistantship Programme for making this project possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See https://fortune.com/2019/05/16/fortune-500-female-ceos, accessed 8/19/18.

² From ILOSTAT, https://www.ilo.org, accessed 9/24/19.

³ As an alternative specification, we divided firms into nine broad industry groups, based on their 2-digit SIC codes and ran each industry group separately. These results are not presented to conserve space, but are available upon request.