Gender, Race, and Promotions within a Private‐Sector Firm

Abstract

This article empirically tests the proposition that the gender‐race composition of an employee's occupation significantly affects the likelihood of promotion. Using data obtained from the personnel files of a financial services firm, we find that a high concentration of white females in an occupation adversely affects the probability of promotion, but only for white females and minorities in that occupation. A similar, attenuated pattern exists in occupations with either high concentrations of minority females or high concentrations of minority males. Additional empirical evidence suggests that the system of rules governing the promotion of white males differs significantly from that of the other three gender‐race groups.

The existence of gender‐specific promotion standards in the U.S.

“…For example, evidence of an 'invisible ceiling' faced by females is found within a large Canadian service sector company (Cannings, 1988;Cannings and Montmarquette, 1991), within a large high-tech Japanese firm (Ariga et al, 1999), and within a medium-sized financial services firm (Paulin and Mellor, 1996). A similar result is found in the context of the legal (Spurr, 1990) and public school administration (Joy, 1998) professions.…”

The Opportunity Structure for Discrimination

“…Similar results are found in Lewis (1986) for the federal bureaucracy and Tsui and Gutek (1984) for a large corporation, the latter using less appropriate data. Other studies, such as Gerhart and Milkovich (1989) and Hartmann (1987), find little evidence of differential promotion rates between men and women, once one takes into account their jobs within an organizational hierarchy, while Paulin and Mellor (1996) report some nonsignificant negative effects for white females in a financial services firm. Powell and Butterfield (1997) find a nonsignificant female advantage in promotion to top management in a federal bureaucracy department from 1987 to 1994.…”

Hierarchical Rank and Women’s Organizational Mobility: Glass Ceilings in Corporate Law Firms

“…This proposition, which we term the increasing-disadvantage model, is a core element of the popular glass ceiling metaphor (Hymowitz and Schellhardt 1986;Federal Glass Ceiling Commission 1995a, p. 9;1995b;Baxter and Wright 2000). Despite continued widespread public acceptance of the glass ceiling idea (Economist 2005) and some consistent findings (Paulin and Mellor 1996;Cohen, Broschak, and Haveman 1998), most research to date has failed to support the increasing-disadvantage model. Indeed, several studies based on private-sector firms find that women's mobility prospects improve, rather than decline, as they climb upward in corporate hierarchies (Bruderl, Preisendorfer, and Ziegler 1993;Spilerman and Petersen 1999;Petersen and Saporta 2004;Dencker 2008).…”