The Importance of Signaling for Women's Careers
Abstract:
We show that signals o f leadership qualification are more important for women's career advancemen t than for men's. Specifically, signals of higher education, professional e xperience and access to professional networks increase male directors' prob ability to enter a leadership position by 5.2%, and their compensation by 5 .7% ($246,900). Female directors with these signals are 11.0% more likely t o enter a leadership position, and their compensation is 19.7% ($796,800) h igher. This result is in line with models of screening discrimination, in w hich women need to provide more observable skill signals to counterbalance higher uncertainty about their unobservable qualifications for a leadership position. Supporting this channel, we find that our results are stronger i f information asymmetries between (mostly) male employers and female candid ates are larger: successions after the sudden death of a CEO, successions i n firms with all-male nomination committees, and outside hires.
DTSTAMP:20260530T135412Z DTSTART:20240404T143000Z DTEND:20240404T160000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR