Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Gender Differences in Monitoring and the Leadership Gap

• In Event: Monitoring and Incentives (Archival)

Abstract

Women are underrepresented in leadership positions despite outperforming men on monitoring tasks – an ordinary but critical work activity for most managerial positions. Using a unique data set on internal resource requests from a large Chinese property management firm, we examine whether this occurs due to gender differences in how managers remediate their subordinates’ errors. Compared to men, women adopt a more democratic approach to remediating errors as evidenced by a greater delay in rejection decisions and a higher incidence of revision requests. Such behavior diminishes the promotion prospects of all managers but particularly women. Additional analyses suggest that this occurs because women have lower social status than men. Overall, we conclude that outperforming men on monitoring tasks does not help women advance to leadership positions because they do not only differ from men in how they remediate their subordinates’ errors but also are evaluated unequally due to status-driven biases.

Authors

• Fei Du, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

• David Hendrik Erkens, Georgetown University

• Kehan Xu, Chinese University of Hong Kong