Recovered from the original publisher: Kellogg Insight
The management pipeline to fill those roles hasn’t gained much more traction for women in the past decade either. In 2015, women comprised 37 percent of corporate-manager jobs; by 2024, that figure only increased to 39 percent. Representation for women in other management categories (such as senior managers and vice presidents) was similarly anemic over the same period. Overall, the data suggests that firms are still investing more resources into hiring and promoting men than women for leadership positions.
But not all men and women compete for management positions in isolation: many marry and start families, which often requires them to make a trade-off between investing time in their family or in their careers, says Benjamin Friedrich, an associate professor of strategy at Kellogg.
“The result of those investments sends signals back to firms about how committed men and women are to working individually—which the firms might then use to decide who is deserving of assignments that ultimately build toward a managerial position,” he says. “And so it basically can create this kind of reinforcement loop.”
Friedrich and his collaborators Rune M. Vejlin, Frederik Almar, and Bastian Schulz of Aarhus University and Ana Reynoso of the University of Michigan used 25 years’ worth of data on families and the firms where they worked to track and mathematically model this family–firm interaction.
Their model replicated the real-world gender gap in corporate managerial roles and found that, among men and women who were equally qualified, women were less likely to receive managerial training and promotions.
“We’re trying to understand what types of systematic reasons lead to differences between men and women in these workplace achievements,” Friedrich says. “Ours is the first framework that puts these two pieces together, by taking seriously the fact that both couples and companies make strategic choices that are intertwined.”
Playing the game of life
Friedrich and his collaborators sourced a rich dataset from Denmark that included more than 150,000 people who began their careers between 1991 and 1995 and tracked their domestic partnerships and employment trajectories over the next 25 years.
“Denmark is a really small country where everything can be collected, hosted, and merged in a central place by the Danish Statistical Agency,” he says. “The labor market in Denmark is pretty similar to the U.S., so there are many broad patterns that we can learn from this small ‘laboratory.’”
Next, the researchers created a mathematical model of how households and companies make decisions about what to invest their resources in—and how those decisions affect each other.
In their model, companies assessed their employees’ value at three stages: the entry level, the mid-career phase, and the mature or management level. Meanwhile, individual workers made several key decisions, including their specific career path, whether to get married, and whether to pull back on work to start a family.