Diverse Routes to Leadership: Gender and Racial Differences in Internal and External Promotions

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2: Exploring Occupations

Abstract

Employees can advance to leadership positions through both internal promotions and external job moves. Yet, we know little about how underrepresented groups navigate these distinct pathways to advancement. Do women and racial minorities follow different promotion pathways than their majority counterparts? If so, why? Although hiring discrimination might encourage underrepresented employees to rely on internal promotions, with current employment signaling a baseline of acceptance, factors such as risk tolerance, networks, geographic constraints, and firm inclusivity could lead to divergent mobility. Using detailed career histories of 13 million U.S. workers across 6,000 firms between 2014 and 2024, we uncover sharp differences by gender and race. Compared with men, women are significantly more likely to advance via internal promotion than by switching employers. In contrast, racial minorities are more likely than White employees to advance through external moves. These patterns persist even after we control for and match on human capital, job roles, and firm characteristics. Importantly, we show that variation in firm demographics, geographic mobility, and inclusion-oriented practices helps explain these gaps in internal versus external advancement. Our findings reveal that advancing in organizational rank is not a one-size-fits-all process: women and racial minorities face distinct constraints and leverage different strategies to advance. As such, internal and external pathways must be examined separately to fully understand how inequality persists—or narrows—in contemporary careers.

Author

• Tiantian Yang, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania