Managerial Promotion: The Effects of Socialization, Specialization, and Gender

Analyzing responses to a questionnaire sent in 1983 to managers in a large Canadian corporation, the author finds that women, who comprised 256 of the 692 managers in the sample and whose average earnings were 87 percent of the men's, were only 80 percent as likely as their male colleagues to be promoted in any given year of their careers with the firm. Although career-relevant factors such as childhood socialization, formal education, and firm-specific productivity had a significant impact on the probability of promotion, the influence of gender on a manager's chances of promotion is found to be sizeable even when those variables are held constant.