Gendered Promotions to Management: Is the Glass Escalator Worse in Men- or Women-Dominated Workplaces?

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Abstract

Prior studies in workplace authority largely suggest that gender authority gaps are greatest in women-dominated occupations, where men move into management faster than women (“glass escalator” Williams 1992). Occupations, however, do not exist in a vacuum but instead are embedded in workplaces. Our paper examines whether women’s disadvantages in women-dominated jobs are worse when these jobs are located in men- or women-dominated workplaces.
We use longitudinal linked-employer-employee data from a representative sample of German establishments (LIAB) between 2012 and 2017 to address this question. Our analyses examine careers of almost 500,000 employees across 7,123 establishments. Consistent with the “glass escalator” literature, our results show gender authority gaps are smallest in men-dominated jobs where gender differences are not significant. Authority gaps increase in women-dominated jobs. The effect of job composition, however, depends on overall establishment composition. Women in men-dominated jobs quickly fall behind their male counterparts when establishments employ a higher percentage of women overall. For instance, when establishments employ more than 60% women, gender authority gaps in men- and women-dominated jobs are equally high. In contrast, gender authority gaps in women-dominated jobs are the same (on a high level) regardless of the establishment composition.

Authors

• Anne Kathrin Kronberg, University of North Carolina-Charlotte

• Anna Gerlach, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Markus Gangl, J.W.Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main