The authors are equally responsible for the present article. We thank our colleagues at the Swedish Institute for Social Research and the Department of Sociology for helpful comments and suggestions. Especially, we would like to thank Per Bavner,

In this paper, it is argued that women's limited access to organizational power structures is a constituent part of the explanation of gender wage inequality. Multi-level analyses conducted on a comprehensive Swedish data set combining information on a large number of private sector employers and all their employees confirm that establishments' gender wage gaps are wider the stronger the male representation among organizational decision-makers, net of individuals' human capital and various organizational features relevant for wage setting. Theoretical explanations focus on gender unequal outcomes of i) general rules and policies decided at higher organizational levels, and ii) everyday decision-making and daily interaction between superiors and their subordinates. On basis of the empirical results, we conclude that gender wage inequality is to a substantial degree driven by everyday decision-making in organizations. It seems as if close supervisors' decisions and suggestions about wage rates, promotions, internal training et cetera are to some extent based on personal preferences, l oyalties, and contacts that are not gender neutral.

Results from analyses of a large Swedish longitudinal data set suggest that men who work in typically female occupations have substantially better internal promotion chances than have equally qualified women in such occupations. This finding is compatible with the idea that a socalled glass escalator takes underrepresented men on an upwardly mobile internal career path at a speed that their female colleagues can hardly enjoy. Furthermore, the results indicate that men and women have equal internal career chances in male-dominated occupations. Hence, the common assumption that obstacles to women’s internal career growth are especially severe in male-dominated fields of work obtains no support.

This paper examines to what extent discrimination accounts for inequalities in authority exertion between women and men in the Swedish labour-market. Processes governing authority attainment are studied in terms of human capital and family responsibilities as well as of the horizontal sex segregation in the labour-market. The empirical results strongly indicate that women are being unduly restricted from attaining supervisory positions at work, primarily within the private sector of the economy. The assumption that discrimination is brought about by decision-makers within work organizations was tentatively tested and proved not to hold, since it was determined that neither women's nor men's chances to reach higher supervisory positions are affected by the sex of the highest workplace manager. The analyses are based upon data from the 1991 Swedish Level of Living Survey and the 1991 Swedish Establishment Survey on a sample of 2017 employees.

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