Jobs, Authority, and Earnings Among Managers

Explanations for women's historic underrepresentation in managerial jobs include actual or assumed sex differences in relevant qualifications, institutional barriers, and men's desire to retain the advantages afforded by managerial status. To the extent that women's increasing representation in managerial jobs stems from declines in real and stereotyped sex differences in qualifications, management jobs should afford women both the organizational authority and the rewards authority customarily gives men. If women's greater share of managerial jobs represent employers' minimal response to antidiscrimination pressures, managers' sex should continue to affect their authority and rewards, net of their inputs and organizational status. This article investigates these alternatives by examining the effect of sex in the access to and returns to authority, using data from a survey of self-described managers. Analyses revealed that women managers were concentrated low in chains of command, that they tended to supervise workers of their own sex, and that their role in decision making was primarily providing input into decisions that men made. Net of education, experience, type of employer, and organizational level, being female reduced the scope of managers' decision-making authority. Moreover, making organizational decisions raised men's but not women's earnings. These results suggest that the desegregation of managerial occupations does not signal the declining significance of sex in workplace authority.