Women Helping Women? Evidence from Private Sector Data on Workplace Hierarchies

This paper studies gender spillovers in career advancement using 11 years ofemployer-employee matched data on the population of white-collar workers at over 4,000private-sector establishments in Norway. Our data include unusually detailed job information foreach worker, which enables us to define seven hierarchical ranks that are consistent acrossestablishments and over time in order to measure promotions (defined as year-to-year rankincreases) even for individuals who change employers. We first find that women havesignificantly lower promotion rates than men across all ranks of the corporate hierarchy, evenafter controlling for a range of individual characteristics (age, education, tenure, experience) andincluding fixed effects for current rank, year, industry, and even work establishment. Inmeasuring the effects of female coworkers, we find positive gender spillovers across ranks(flowing from higher-ranking to lower-ranking women) but negative spillovers within ranks. Thefinding that greater female representation at higher ranks narrows the gender gap in promotionrates at lower ranks suggests that policies that increase female representation in corporateleadership can have spillover benefits to women in lowers ranks