clilmbing the ladder, gender-specific career advancement.pdf

Climbing the Ladder: Gender-SpecificCareer Advancement in FinancialServices and the Influence of FlexibleWork-Time ArrangementsInge Noback, Lourens Broersma andJouke van Dijk

Abstract

The aim of this study is to gain insight into the gender-specific career advance-ment of about 10,000 middle- and top-level managers in a Dutch financialservices company. Our results indicate that women earn less, work at lower joblevels, but show slightly higher career mobility than men. However, working acompressed four-day nine-hours-a-day workweek turns out to be favourable forwomen who are ‘rewarded’ for working full time, whereas men are ‘penalized’for not working five days a week. Introducing this form of flexibility into apredominantly masculine organizational culture offers new opportunities forcareer advancement, albeit solely for women.

1. Introduction

Both men and women may encounter difficulties in the course of their occu-pational career, which can be linked to organizational aspects, existing preju-dice, the presence of informal networks, and norms and values related tomanagement positions (Eagly and Carli 2007). Women, in particular, face thedouble burden syndrome of combining caretaking activities and other unpaidwork with a paid job. The financial service sector is traditionally a typicalmasculine sector — very competitive, hierarchical and with high risks.Although the sector has been feminizing in terms of employees, the boards ofdirectors continue to lack diversity (Sealy et al. 2009). Similar to other sectors,women are over-represented in jobs where communication and human contactare important, and under-represented at the top levels (Van Staveren 2011). In

Inge Noback, Lourens Broersma and Jouke van Dijk are at the University of Groningen.

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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12048••:•• •• 2013 0007–1080 pp. ••–••

© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

this article, we will demonstrate the existence of a masculine organizationalculture in a financial services company where male employees who work acompressed workweek with a 4/36 schedule (see later) work at lower job levels,earn less and show lower career mobility than their female counterparts.

This research can be positioned in a growing number of quantitativestudies that focus on gender-specific career advancement and other relatedaspects, such as discrimination, informal networks and organizationalculture (e.g. Eddleston et al. 2004; Guillaume and Pochic 2009). The aim ofthis article is to gain insight into the gender-specific dynamics of careeradvancement and the influence of flexible work-time arrangements. Careeradvancement is measured in terms of tangible outcomes, namely salary, joblevel and career mobility. We explore the extent to which sex, householdsituation, corporate culture, human capital and spatial mobility have signifi-cant effects on the career success of male and female employees, based on theanalysis of approximately 10,000 middle- and top-level managers. These datawere obtained from the personnel records of a major Dutch financial servicescompany and contained information about career advancement over theperiod 2001–2008, including background characteristics of the employees. Asa case study for gender-specific career advancement, this firm is of interestbecause of its progressive reputation with regard to human resources policies.The company is publicly acclaimed for their favourable working conditionsand female-friendly policies, which will be discussed shortly.

We pay special attention to the relation between career success and newworking-time arrangements, in particular the compressed workweek (Balteset al. 1999), which entails working a four-day nine-hours-a-day (4/36) sched-ule. This compressed workweek (4/36) has come into existence during theeconomic crisis in the 1980s. High unemployment was an incentive for firmsto create more jobs by decreasing the amount of hours in a standard work-week in the collective labour agreement of the business. According to thehuman resources department of the firm, the main motivation to introducethe 4/36 schedule was indeed to create more jobs.1 Flexible working-timearrangements, such as the compressed workweek, facilitate the combinationof work and care, which, given the gendered division of care tasks and otherhousehold responsibilities, most likely contributes to the career advancementof women and in particular mothers. In the Netherlands, the majority ofwomen work part time to take care of their children, rather than opting forfull-time formal day care (Noback et al. 2013).

There is a growing interest in gender diversity in the financial sector since thepublication of Women Matter by McKinsey and Company (Desvaux et al.2007), where it was suggested that firms with a larger share of women on theboard have better financial performance. The company we have analysed ismotivated by this study to improve performance in a highly competitive sectorby a publicly committed policy to increase the number of female top-levelmanagers. To achieve this goal, the firm stimulates career advancement oftalented women through coaching and training programmes, and stimulatesthe visibility of talented women in the organization. In the Netherlands,

2 British Journal of Industrial Relations

© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013.

however, the majority of women work part time, and few women work intop-level management positions (Merens and Hermans 2008). Given that thecompany is part of a predominantly masculine sector, in a societal context inwhich the majority of women work part time, we are interested in exploringpossible differences in career success of male and female managers, and to gaininsight into the underlying factors that contribute to these differences.

The article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we begin with a briefdescription of some recent developments in the Dutch labour market. Next,we present a theoretical framework to explain career advancement andthe expected value of the explanatory variables divided into three groups:(a) gender and household, (b) corporate culture and human capital, and(c) spatial mobility. In Section 3, the data and methodology are described.Section 4 discusses the empirical results based on some descriptive statistics,which is followed by a discussion of the estimation results obtained from aneconometric model. The article ends with a summary of the results andprovides general conclusions in relation to policy.

2. Career advancement: Theory and background

In the past decades, significant changes have taken place in the Dutch labourmarket. This is especially true for the position of women on the labourmarket. The educational level of women has risen, and subsequently theyhave more opportunities on the labour market. Furthermore, women remainon the labour market after the birth of their first child, thereby significantlyreducing the occurrence of career breaks. Partly as a result of these changes,female labour market participation rates have increased substantially. In theperiod 1996–2008, the number of jobs for women increased by 44 per cent,whereas the number of jobs for men increased by only 14 per cent (LISANews 2009: 7). Where in the 1980s the Dutch labour market was character-ized by the ‘Dutch disease’ due to the extremely high levels of unemployment,in the next decade this turned around completely into ‘the Dutch miracle’.Dutch unemployment rates have remained the lowest in Europe for almost adecade (European Commission 2008: 37). Together with Denmark andSweden, Eurostat lists the Netherlands as one of the few countries thatexceeded the Lisbon 2010 target of 70 per cent for the overall employmentrate at the end of the 1990s. In fact, the Dutch female participation rate is alsoabove 70 per cent as of 2008, and is thus substantially above the Lisbontarget of 60 per cent for females.

Other significant changes are the way in which the service sector hasbecome dominant and the flexibility on the labour market, which hasincreased in many respects. One aspect of this flexibility is the tremendousincrease in part-time jobs that are mainly taken up by the rapidly increasingnumber of women — especially married women — entering the labourmarket. Almost half of employees work part time (i.e. less than 30 hours perweek). Three-quarters of women and one-quarter of men work part time, and

Climbing the Ladder 3


for both groups this is about three times the European average (EuropeanCommission 2008: 39). The traditional male breadwinner model has beenreplaced by the one-and-a-half income model as the dominant model, inwhich men continue to be the main breadwinner. It is also interesting to notethat only 5 per cent of Dutch workers indicate that they work part time on aninvoluntary basis, whereas at the European level this is more than 20per cent, and for some countries it is even half the workforce that involun-tarily works part time (Fagan 2003, table 11).

With the introduction of the adjustment of hours act in 2000, employeeshave been given the right to request an upward or downward adjustment ofworking hours. Unless the employer can prove it is detrimental to the busi-ness, they have to comply and assure the employee continues to have thesame access to training and promotion opportunities. This development, atleast in part, explains the high voluntary basis of part-time work in theNetherlands and the relative high proportion of male part-time work.

Despite these changes, the position of Dutch women in the labour marketdeviates from the position of women in neighbouring countries. In the Neth-erlands, women work fewer hours, regardless of educational attainment orthe presence of children. We may conclude that, in terms of access to jobs, theNetherlands has one of the highest scores in Europe. But a very large pro-portion of employees work part time and indicate that they are happy withthis arrangement. Because both men and women work part time, the Neth-erlands is an ideal setting for studying the gender-specific effects of part-timework on career opportunities.

Gender, Household and Career Advancement

A wide range of empirical evidence suggests that women face more obstaclesthat hinder career advancement than men do (see, e.g., Eddleston et al. 2004;Tharenou 2005). Based on a review, Tharenou (2005) found that the barriersmost often referred to are gender discrimination, male hierarchies and thelack of informal networks that help women to advance. These barriers arepart of an existing male-dominated organizational structure that is chal-lenged by the increasing number of higher educated working women com-peting for career advancement. The relation between career advancementand organizational culture is discussed in the next section.

Kottke and Agars (2005) argue that the impact of social cognitions, espe-cially gender stereotypes and social identity, is most important to women’sadvancement because they are integral to so much of the thought, behaviourand attitudes of employees. Gender discrimination is directly related to per-sistent stereotypes, such as ‘women are quitters’ (Stroh et al. 1996) and ‘menare more competitive and career oriented’ (Van Vianen and Fischer 2002).According to Swim et al. (1989), women are negatively affected by genderstereotypes in the evaluation of performance. This can manifest itself in lowersalaries for women. Another explanation is the moderating effect of havingchildren on career advancement, as described by Metz (2005). Because of



reduced working hours, women invest less in training and developmentopportunities, and they also face the negative stereotyping of being lesscommitted to having a career. Women are perceived to be less endowed withmanagerial abilities as compared with men, despite changes in perceptionsover recent decades (Powell et al. 2002). Also, sexism and the assumptionregarding men’s superior leadership capabilities are serious obstacles towomen’s advancement (Kottke and Agars 2005). Kottke and Agars (2005),furthermore, discuss the impact of social identity on women’s advancement.Being a member of a social group, or in this case being male or female, formsan important part of an employee’s identity. This individual identity, basedon a social group, can cause in-group bias and group conflict.

In the literature on gender and career advancement, family status orthe work–family balance is frequently described as a barrier for women(e.g. Dykstra and Fokkema 2000; Eddleston et al. 2004; Kirchmeyer 1998).Whereas male careers often benefit from having children, because it pushesthem to make career choices beneficial to their role as the main breadwinner,having children makes women less likely to pursue a career, due to the extrademands of caretaking (Tharenou et al. 1994). In their research on the glassceiling and cultural preferences, Van Vianen and Fischer (2002) found thatwomen perceived the work–home conflict as the most important barrier thatprevented them from accepting a senior management position, regardless oftheir ambition. However, the work–family balance can also pose a barrier forfathers, as recent research of Vinkenburg et al. (2012) showed. Fathers on a‘daddy track’ who worked reduced hours were perceived as less competentand successful than full-time working fathers (Vinkenburg et al. 2012).

In her study on the career advancement of mothers, Metz (2005) foundthat family responsibilities and work discontinuity are more likely to bereported as barriers by mothers, and personal traits and lack of promotion orwork opportunities by non-mothers. Having children has a moderating effecton career advancement in the form of insufficient training and developmentopportunities, and working hours. Previous studies have showed that havingchildren can reduce the number of hours women work and the training theyobtain (Metz 2005; Tharenou et al. 1994). In addition, Metz (2005) alsomentions that many women perceive family responsibilities as a barrier totheir advancement because of existing stereotypes among colleagues andsuperiors. Dykstra and Fokkema (2000) showed that the absence of house-hold obligations, either by being single women and/or remaining childless,promotes women’s occupational success. This relation between the absenceof family ties and achieving occupational success is also referred to as thedemographic price for success. Although one might expect singles to be morecareer-oriented, employees with family responsibilities are considered to bemore stable and reliable, resulting in more career advancement comparedwith their single colleagues. This particularly holds for male employees(Herzog and Schlottmann 1984; Nickell 1979). Career-oriented women, onthe other hand, tend to be single, and postpone or refrain from havingchildren (Metz 2005).



Based on the foregoing, we expect that male managers benefit from beinga parent, and female managers are hindered due to work–home conflicts intheir career advancement. We also expect that being single is beneficial forcareer success, but particularly so for women.

Corporate Culture, Human Capital and Career Advancement

Formal organizational structures are not gender-neutral according toMcDowell and Court (1994), but rather management and corporate strategyplay a central role in the construction of gendered identities in the workplace.These gendered identities are embedded in the everyday social practices andtherefore the occupational culture. Or as Acker (2006) states, ‘banks aregendered organizations in the most obvious sense: wages, tasks and hierar-chical positions are all distributed differently to men and women’ (p. 195).Organizations have what she calls ‘gendered regimes’, internal structures,processes and beliefs that distribute men and women into different tasks andpositions (Acker 2006).

Although organizational cultures are based on a combination of masculineand feminine characteristics, in general they tend to be more masculine (e.g.Guillaume and Pochic 2009; Priola and Brannan 2009; Van Vianen andFischer 2002). Management cultures, in particular, are dominated by mas-culine norms and values, such as the establishment of status and authority,hierarchical relations, the notion of a linear career path, and competition.These organizational cultures form a barrier to women’s careers through aprocess of exclusion and selection (Van Vianen and Fischer 2002). Exclusionrefers to issues described in the previous section on gender, such as genderstereotypes and prejudiced attitudes. Selection refers to selection by others,for example, male top-level managers favouring male colleagues, and self-selection. An example of self-selection is work preferences that deviate fromthe existing organizational structure that can result in women switchingemployers or rejecting opportunities for promotion. Priola and Brannan(2009) argue that leaving an organization or rejecting opportunities for pro-motion are forms of resistance against a masculine organizational culture.Female managers who were able to adopt and display masculine character-istics more often succeeded in being promoted to senior levels (Guillaumeand Pochic 2009; Kerfoot and Knights 1998).

Over the course of a lifetime, people invest in their human capital indifferent ways, starting with a general level of human capital gained througheducation. The accumulation of human capital acquired during a workingcareer comprised sector-specific knowledge (Simpson 1992) and enterprise-specific human capital gained through on-the-job training. Employees investin knowledge and skills over the years, aiming to maximize the utility of thisaccumulated human capital (Becker 1962). Dieckhoff and Steiber (2010)showed that male employees are more likely to participate in on-the-jobtraining than their female colleagues. Although human capital theory andgender role theory could not predict female participation in training, they



found that fatherhood positively influenced male participation. This can beexplained by greater job attachment or job security following from taking onthe role of breadwinner. Sector- and enterprise-specific knowledge, however,can be lost as a result of job mobility. According to Van Ham (2002),employers place more value on the human capital acquired through a con-tinuous career, and this accords with the masculine notion of a linear career.Women who have children during their career experience career breaks,which negatively affects their career opportunities.

We, therefore, expect that employees who most behave in accordance withthe corporate culture benefit in terms of their career advancement. Since themasculine corporate culture dictates full-time work and being available any-where and anytime, working a compressed 4/36 schedule is expected to havea negative influence on career success. Since the majority of Dutch womenwork part time, we expect that the negative influence of 4/36 will be smallerfor female managers because a 36-hour workweek is a full-time contract inthe Netherlands. Higher levels of human capital lead to more career advance-ment, although the magnitude of the effects might differ for male and femaleemployees, particularly when they are parents.

Spatial Mobility and Career Advancement

According to Van Ham (2002), long-distance commuting and workplacemobility in the form of long-distance migration are also factors that exert aninfluence on career advancement. Guillaume and Pochic (2009) found in thecase of a major French utility company with its headquarters in Paris thatmanagers are not supposed to build their career in one site because they needto keep some distance from the local social context, showing their loyalty tothe organization first. Accepting a geographical move in their career is oftenpresented as the norm to access top executive positions, and it is risky torefuse an assignment to another location. In the end, working in Paris is mostprofitable because the number of highly paid jobs is larger there than in otherareas. Eddleston et al. (2004) developed a model to explain managerial careersuccess using willingness to relocate as a predictor. Frequency of relocation isconsidered to be one of the reasons why women’s managerial career advance-ment lags behind that of men: women, especially those with children, relocateless frequently (Bielby and Bielby 1992; Brett 1997; Guillaume and Pochic2009). Furthermore, workplace mobility only benefits career advancementwhen an individual migrates for his/her own career. Since men are often themain breadwinner, most long-distance moves occur for the sake of theircareer, and women migrate along as tied movers (Van Ham 2002).

Women also tend to have a shorter commute distance and time than men(see, among others, Camstra 1996; Hanson and Pratt 1988; Turner andNiemeier 1997). This can be explained using the time geographical perspec-tive, in which time is an important constraint on our spatial behaviour. Sincewomen do a large share of the unpaid work, they have less time available forwork and also for travelling to work (Hanson and Pratt 1990). This also



explains the fact that women have a greater preference for working a com-pressed workweek with a 4/36 schedule, instead of working five days.

We expect employees who are willing to travel longer distances to havemore prosperous careers. Furthermore, we expect that workplace mobility,or accepting relocation, will be beneficial in terms of career success. Thiseffect may be more pronounced for male employees because they are mostlikely to migrate to further their career, whereas women are more likely to betied movers.

3. Data and methods

Data

The data used in this article were provided by the human resources depart-ment of a large Dutch financial services company with around 30,000employees working in the Netherlands. The firm is a multinational companywith over 100,000 employees worldwide, and with activities in the areas ofbanking, investment, life insurance and retirement services. However, thisresearch includes only employees working in the Netherlands. The data werederived from the personnel records, and contain information on personalcharacteristics, such as age, marital status, number of children and age of theyoungest child, and career characteristics including when employment at thefirm began, work-time arrangements, appraisal scores and job location forboth May 2008 and May 2001.

We focus on employees who work in middle management and higher levelsbecause of their high potential for promotion to senior management levels.Middle management starts at job level 9 (in a range from 1 (lowest) to 15(highest) job level), and employees working at level 9 or higher possess adegree from a college of higher education or university. Because we areinterested in career mobility among senior management staff, we selectedemployees who have worked for the company for at least seven years, whichis a reasonable period for promotion to take place. The total number ofpeople working for this company in May 2008 at level 9 or higher was almost15,000 employees, comprising about half of the employees. Within thatgroup, 75 per cent were male. The number of employees with at least sevenyears’ tenure was roughly 9,500, and this was 65 per cent of the employeeswith job level 9 and above. Among employees with seven or more years’tenure, the proportion of males was also 75 per cent.

Operationalization of Explanatory Variables

The dependent variable in the analysis is career advancement, which is mea-sured in terms of tangible outcomes, namely full-time annual salary in 2008,job level in 2008 and career mobility, which is measured as the difference injob level between 2001 and 2008. In Section 4, we will present the results of



three separate models using ordinary least square (OLS) estimations. To testwhether there are significant differences between male and female employeesin terms of income, job level and career mobility, we will include the dummyvariable sex in the models. This tells us whether there is a significant struc-tural difference between men and women. In order to obtain insight intodifferences of the magnitude and significance of the effects, we also estimatethe models for males and females separately. We control for differences inhousehold formation by including two dummy variables: being single andhaving a dependent child younger than 13 years of age.

We include two human capital variables in our model in order to distin-guish between ‘firm-specific’ human capital and human capital built up fromjob experience with other employers. Firm-specific human capital accumu-lation can be obtained directly from the data as the number of working yearsin the firm (tenure). External work experience can be derived indirectly fromthe dataset by assuming that each person started working at the same age of20 and subtracting tenure. This implies that external job experience can beexpressed as the following: age − 20 − tenure. Unfortunately, we do not havespecific information on the level of education of the employees, other thanthe knowledge that the employees at least have a degree from university ortertiary vocational education.

To measure the effect of working part time, we include working less than32 hours a week as a dummy variable. To measure the effect of workinga compressed workweek, we include a dummy variable for all employeesworking a four-day nine-hours-a-day schedule (4/36). Above-averageappraisal scores are included as a proxy for performance. Appraisal scoresrange between 5 (poor work evaluation) and 1 (excellent work evaluation), soall employees with a score of 1 or 2 are considered to be performing aboveaverage. A dummy for above-average annual sick days is also included. Theaverage number of sick days per year is 12, and because of the nonlinearity ofsick days we include a dummy with the value of 1 for all employees who weresick for more than 12 days in the past year.

Finally, we include the kilometres travelled between home and work in ouranalysis to measure spatial mobility. We also include a dummy variable tomeasure whether the employee has relocated to Amsterdam, where the firmheadquarters are located. Working in Amsterdam or elsewhere in the countryis also measured by a dummy variable.

Model Specification

Differences in career advancement between male and female employees areexplained by means of an OLS regression using personal and career charac-teristics as previously described. We set up three model specifications cover-ing different aspects of career advancement. The first two specifications givean explanation for full-time annual salary and job level in May 2008. Thesalary of part-time workers is made comparable to full-time workers byadjusting the number of hours worked to full-time equivalents (FTE). The



model explaining differences in salary was initially estimated using the appro-priate log transformation for wage. However, since the coefficients of themodel without the log transformation can be interpreted directly in euros,and the log transformation did not improve the fit of the model, we prefer topresents the results of the model without the log transformation.

Formally, the models for wage and job level are expressed as follows:

Wage Job level sex childsingle hours

( ) = + + ⋅ <+ ⋅ + ⋅ +

⋅α α αα α0 1 2

3 4

1332 αα

α αα α

5

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5 1515 2510 11α α iience

commute commute kmjob not in Am

>+ − + ⋅ >+ ⋅

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14

α αα ssterdam + ε

In the third specification below, the dependent variable is career mobilitymeasured as the difference in job level between 2008 and 2001. Because wemeasure the difference between two periods, we use a growth model, struc-tured as follows:

Δ ΔCareermobility joblevel gender children= + + ++

⋅ ⋅ ⋅α α α αα0 1 2 301’

44 5 6

7

32 01 085

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8

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Δ tte kmRelocate to Amsterdam

( )+ − − +⋅α ε11 Δ

Job level in 2001 is used as a starting point just as tenure and external jobexperience. We did not have data on all personal and career characteristicsfor 2001. The change in the number of children is included in the model, aswell as the change in hours worked, measured in FTE. Furthermore, adummy variable is included to measure whether someone worked part time inboth 2001 and 2008, assuming that this has not changed in the periodbetween 2001 and 2008. Finally, change in commuting distance is included, aswell as a dummy variable, to measure whether an employee has relocated toAmsterdam.

Heteroscedasticity, which is a common problem for larger micro datasets,was corrected for using White’s heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errorsand covariance (White 1980).

4. Results

To explore possible differences between male and female managers in salary,job level and career mobility, as well as differences with respect to personaland career characteristics, we start with the discussion of some descriptive



statistics. Table 1 gives an overview of the differences between male andfemale employees and the statistical significance of these differences. t-teststatistics and chi-square tests indicate that all the differences between menand women in Table 1 are significant, with the exception of above-averageappraisal scores, 0–5 years of external experience and working in Amster-dam. What is interesting to note is that although women earn less and workat lower job levels, their average career mobility is higher than the averagemale career mobility. Furthermore, women are more often single, and closeto 50 per cent of the women have dependent children.

The majority of women deviate from the standard full-time workweek offive days, either because they work part time or they work a compressedworkweek (4/36). However, one-third of men also opt for the compressed4/36 schedule. With regard to tenure and external job experience, it becomesclear that female employees are younger and subsequently have less jobexperience.

Table 2 shows the extent of feminization in the firm by means of thefeminization rate (per cent of women) of young, mid-career and senior man-agers (see also Guillaume and Pochic 2009). The total number of employeesin job level 15 combined with the board of directors is 145. There are noyoung female managers working in job level 14; therefore, the feminizationrate is zero for level 14. Furthermore, two young female managers work atlevel 15 and one on the board, whereas no young male managers work atthese levels. As a result, both levels add up to 100 per cent feminization.

TABLE 1Descriptive Statistics for Employees with Seven Years’ Tenure in Financial Services Firm

Female Male

Dependentvariables

Average salary (in euros per year 1 FTE)*** 62,573 70,676Average job level (9–15 and board)*** 10.5 10.8Average career mobility (job level ’01–’08)*** 1.2 0.9

Explanatoryvariables

% Children < 13*** 48 39% Singles*** 24 17% Working < 32 hours*** 35 3% Working compressed week 4/36** 31 33% Above-average appraisal score 28 27% > 12 sick days year*** 22 18Tenure (years)*** 14.6 18.5% External experience 0–5 39 40% External experience 5–15*** 51 46% External experience 15–25*** 9 13% External experience > 25* 0.8 1.2% Commuting distance km 0–30*** 71 62% Commuting distance km 30–50** 21 24% Commuting distance km > 50*** 10 17% Working in Amsterdam 39 38% Relocating to Amsterdam*** 16 11

* significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%.FTE, full-time equivalents.



Like Guillaume and Pochic (2009), we also find that the feminization ofmanagement roles has increased considerably, and now almost 40 per cent ofthe young managers are women. Among senior managers, women make uponly 15 per cent and the glass ceiling becomes apparent. In particular, seniorfemale managers hardly enter the highest echelons of the company.

We now turn to a discussion of the estimation results for the econometricmodels, which explain the differences in earnings, job level and career mobil-ity. Table 3 gives the estimates for the total sample of each of the threemodels. The sex-specific models for salary, job level and career mobility canbe found in Table 4. Furthermore, we also estimated the three models for aselection of employees who work a compressed workweek (4/36), comprisingone-third of our sample. These employees have adopted a new work-timeregime in which they benefit from a more flexible schedule while still workingfull time. These results can be found in the Appendix.

The overall performance of the models explaining the salary and job levelin May 2008 in terms of the adjusted R2 yields values between 0.15 and 0.20.The salary model has also been estimated in a logarithmic transformation,and the adjusted R2 values are now about 0.2–0.25, but the t-values show onlyminor differences. We do not discuss the model with the logarithmic trans-formation because the interpretation of the simple model is more straight-forward: the coefficients reflect the difference in earnings in euros. Inaddition, logarithms might circumvent heteroscedasticity, but the use of theWhite robust covariance estimator does allow for correct interpretation ofthe reported t-statistics.

In line with the theoretical expectations, and as has already become clearfrom the descriptive results, the econometric model in Table 3 confirms thatwomen earn significantly less than their male colleagues; on a full-time yearsalary of €53,190, women earn €1,412 less than their male colleagues. Aftercontrolling for tenure and work-time arrangements, there is however nosignificant difference in job level between male and female employees. Themultivariate model reveals that the over-representation of women in middle

TABLE 2Feminization Rate of Employees with Seven Years’ Tenure

Young managers(<35 years) (%)

Mid-career(35–44 years) (%)

Senior managers(>45 years) (%)

Total(%)

Nemployees

9 39.9 38.1 20.5 30 2,13410 34.8 35.1 14.7 25.4 2,71911 39.4 36.4 14.9 26.7 2,21912 37.3 26.9 9.9 19 1,34413 40.0 25.7 10 18.4 75614 0 18 7.9 12.8 25815 100 6.5 3.7 6.1 115Board 100 23.1 0 13.3 30Total (%) 38 33.2 14.5 24.7N employees 965 3,990 1,659 9,575



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management, as shown in Table 2, is explained by shorter tenure and notworking full time. For career mobility, we found that contrary to expecta-tions, being female has a significant positive effect, even after taking intoaccount tenure and job experience. This confirms that the statistically signifi-cant higher career mobility shown in Table 1 remains significant after con-trolling for differences in personal and career characteristics.

The results of effects of personal characteristics on career advancementwere, to a large extent, in line with the theoretical expectations. We found anegative relation between being single and income and job levels. Table 4shows that single males earn €5,424 per year, that is approximately 10 percent less compared with their male colleagues with partners. Similarly, singlefemales earn about 5 per cent less, indicating that single men, in particular,are considered to be less stable and reliable. Employees with young childrenearn more and also work at higher job levels. The positive effect for womenis substantially higher; they earn €5,213 a year more, as opposed to men whoearn €2,238 a year more. Where men are concerned, one can make the sameargument as Tharenou et al. (1994) that they make career choices beneficialto their role as breadwinner. For women, it is more likely that they postponethe birth of their first child to invest in their career opportunities first, whichis clearly rewarded. Table 3 shows no significant relation between anincreased number of children in the period 2001–2008 and career mobility.However, in Table 4, it becomes apparent that having more children has apositive effect on promotion for male managers. Having more childrenpushes men into the role of main breadwinner, and being the main bread-winner means they behave according to the gender stereotypical expecta-tions. The results confirm that this behaviour is beneficial for careeradvancement of male employees, but not for females.

Work-time arrangements proved to be important determinants of careeradvancement for both male and female managers. We found a strong nega-tive significant relation between working part time (<32 hours a week) andcareer success in every aspect. For male managers, working part time costs€11,606 on a yearly basis, and for female managers it is slightly less expensiveto work part time, it costs €9,290. Similarly, employees who work com-pressed workweeks (4/36) earn about 20 per cent less a year and work inlower job levels compared with their colleagues who work five-day weeks. Incontrast to this, the negative effect of working a compressed workweek istwice as high for men than for women. Male managers who work a 4/36schedule earn almost 20 per cent less of a yearly salary, whereas femalemanagers earn about 10 per cent less compared with five-day workingcolleagues.

We estimated the models again for the selection of employees with acompressed 4/36 schedule, and the results can be found in the Appendix.Within this selection, female managers who work a compressed workweekearn more, work in higher job levels and have a higher career mobility thantheir male colleagues who also opt for a 4/36 schedule. Clearly, male man-agers are supposed to work five rather than four days a week. Finally, the



results also show that employees who have increased their working hoursshow higher career mobility, and the coefficient in Table 4 is slightly higherfor female managers compared with their male colleagues.

In addition to the work-time arrangements, the other career characteristicsalso reveal some interesting differences in the career success of male andfemale managers. Table 3 shows that managers with above-average numberof sick days earn €5,200 less and work in lower job levels, but for men theeffect is twice as large as for women (Table 4). On the other hand, managerswho perform above average earn more and work at higher job levels, and thecoefficients in Table 4 indicate that this effect is stronger for male than forfemale managers.

Furthermore, we find that, in accordance with the theoretical expectations,tenure and external job experience exert a positive significant effect onincome and job level. It is also clear that additional years of internal experi-ence have a smaller effect than more years of external experience.2 Table 4shows that, for women, more than 25 years of external experience even leadto lower additional income than 15–25 years of experience, implying that themarginal effect of a year of additional external experience becomes negativewhen such experience exceeds 25 years. This result may also have been causedby the fact that older women with many years of experience had feweropportunities for promotion when they were young and were put in dead-endjobs. For males, additional years of external experience continue to have apositive effect, although the marginal effect decreases slightly.

In contrast to the positive effect of experience on income and job level,more years of experience show a negative relation with career mobility, withhardly any differences by gender. The magnitude of internal experience issomewhat larger as compared with external experience. The negative relationcan be explained by the dialectics of progress. The lower the job level in 2001,the more available are the opportunities for career mobility. There are farmore job opportunities in middle management levels than at the seniormanagement level. In all models, longer external experience has morefavourable effects than longer internal experience, particularly for males.This is probably because people coming from other companies have betterbargaining positions than employees eligible for promotion within thecompany itself.

Finally, we turn to the relation between spatial mobility and career success.We expected that those who commute longer distances will achieve a higherposition because enhanced mobility is an indicator of greater flexibilityand commitment. In addition, employees in higher functions with bettersalaries can afford to live further away from work in pleasant residentialneighbourhoods. This expectation is confirmed in the empirical models wherewe did indeed find a positive significant relation between commuting distancegreater than 30 km and career advancement. Although the average commut-ing distance was slightly lower for the female employees, the sex-specificestimates showed that the pay-off for women (€3,185) was substantiallyhigher than for men (€1,857) when they commute more than 50 km. The



general time-geography literature also confirms that women find it moreburdensome to commute longer distances to work because of the combina-tion of work and family responsibilities. Our results suggest that womenindeed are rewarded when they are prepared to commute longer distances.

Because the board of directors and the majority of senior staff positions arelocated in Amsterdam, we expect that career opportunities will be better ifcompany employees work in Amsterdam, and this expectation is confirmedby the empirical outcomes. Employees who do not work in Amsterdam donot earn as much, and work at lower job levels than their colleagues inAmsterdam, and this is also the case for the sex-specific models. Also, thecareer mobility of employees who have relocated to Amsterdam is signifi-cantly higher, but in the sex-specific models this only holds for men, while thecoefficient for females becomes insignificant. A possible explanation might bethat a substantial proportion of women move to Amsterdam for reasonsother than their own career.

5. Discussion

The aim of this study was to explore possible differences in career success ofmale and female managers, and to gain insight into the underlying factorsthat contribute to these differences. We studied gender-specific differences incareer advancement in a Dutch financial services company with 30,000employees on the payroll. The acclaimed progressive human resources poli-cies of this firm and specific coaching and training to increase female careeradvancement in the context of a traditionally masculine sector provide aninteresting case to study gender-specific career advancement. This companycarries out an explicit strategy of investing in gender diversity as a way ofincreasing corporate performance. Career advancement was measured interms of tangible outcomes, namely salary, current job level and careermobility between 2001 and 2008.

Studying the dynamics of gender-specific career advancement in the Neth-erlands is of particular interest because the Netherlands has clearly reachedthe Lisbon 2010 targets for overall employment rates and female employmentrates, while at the same time the majority of Dutch women work part timeand the percentage of female top-level managers is low. Despite the adjust-ment of hours act in 2000, which in principle provides part-time workers thesame rights for training and promotion opportunities as full timers, in prac-tice working part time leaves less time to invest in the development of humancapital. In spite of that, financial services companies are investing in increas-ing the number of female managers at top-level positions to improvecompany performance. In this study, we have explored the sex-specific careeroutcomes in a financial services company based on an analysis of almost10,000 middle- and top-level managers over the period 2001–2008. We haveanalysed differences in salaries, job levels and career mobility by estima-ting models for both the total sample and by sex, including an analysis of



employees who have adopted new work-time regimes in the form of a com-pressed four-day nine-hours-a-day workweek (4/36 schedule).

The empirical results largely confirm the theoretical expectations and find-ings obtained in other empirical studies. But the richness of our dataset alsoleads to some interesting new findings. Traditional findings are that womenearn less than men and attain lower job levels. We found evidence of atraditional masculine corporate regime where career success is highest forproductive, above-average performing, male managers with families whowork full time, 5-day weeks. Additional years of experience both inside andoutside the firm lead to higher income and job levels, while these variables arenegatively affected for singles, managers who work part time or in a com-pressed workweek (4/36). Working in Amsterdam, where the headquartersare located, leads to better career opportunities, and the same is true for thosewho commute greater distances.

However, when the models are estimated separately for male and femalemanagers, the magnitude of the coefficients shows interesting differences bysex. Factors that can be associated with the traditional masculine careerpattern show a higher pay-off for males than for females, as becomes appar-ent from the coefficients we found for years of job experience, especiallyexternal job experience, and above-average appraisal scores. On the otherhand, our results show that the presence of factors that typically constitute aburden to females in developing a career is less harmful to women’s careeropportunities than men’s. If men, however, work part time or a compressed4/36 schedule, they earn a substantially lower salary than their full-timeworking male colleagues, compared with the salary differences of their femalecounterparts. Opting for alternative work-time arrangements hinders thecareer advancement of male employees because they deviate from the mas-culine corporate regime of being available anywhere and anytime. Femaleemployees who work a 4/36 compressed workweek, on the other hand,benefit because they work full time in a country where the majority of womenwork part time due to caretaking responsibilities. By working the maximumamount of hours possible in this compressed workweek arrangement, theycomply with the corporate model as much as can be expected in the Dutchcontext, and this has positive effects on their careers.

The penalty of being single or being employed outside Amsterdam is alsohigher for men than for women. For women, the presence of young childrenand commuting long distances lead to more compensation in salary and joblevel than for men. With regard to the model that directly explains theoccurrence of career moves, the most striking gender difference is found forrelocation to Amsterdam. For males, this significantly improves their career,whereas for females the effect is insignificant, which may suggest that femalesrelocate to Amsterdam for other reasons than their own career. In the litera-ture, these women are called ‘tied movers’.

This case study presents new evidence on the impact of gendered corporateregimes on the career advancement of male and female managers in thefinancial service sector. The main results are that factors associated with



traditional masculine career patterns show a higher pay-off for males, andfactors that typically constitute a burden to females in developing a career aremore harmful for the career success of male managers. To a certain extent,these findings can be generalized because they fit into the existing theoreticalframework on gendered organizations (McDowell and Court 1994) andgender regimes (Acker 2006), and to a certain extent they are the result of theDutch context in which the majority of women work part time.

However, the highly gendered effect of working a compressed workweek(4/36) on career success is more difficult to generalize because this is arelatively new development and not much is known about this phenomenon.It is nevertheless striking to find that within the group of employees who dowork a 4/36 schedule, women are ‘rewarded’ for working full time, whereasmen are ‘punished’ for not being available five days a week. More research isneeded to explore to what extent these findings can be generalized to othersectors and to other countries.

Some policy implications can be inferred from the results presented in thisstudy. The preference of Dutch women to work part time and the corporateculture of working full time in top-level positions appear irreconcilable.However, the emergence of a compressed 4/36 workweek appears to partlybridge this gap, although the effects only benefit women. The introduction ofalternative work-time regimes, such as the 4/36 schedule, in combination withraising awareness of and redefining the existing corporate regimes withrespect to linear career paths and job commitment, needs to be considered inorder to make top-level positions accessible for women. Only in this way canfirms realize a higher performance level due to more diversity by means ofmore women in top-level positions.

Final version accepted on 10 October 2013.

Acknowledgement

This article was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for ScientificResearch (NWO) Grant Number 400-03-473.

Notes

1. A 36-hour working week is considered full time in the Dutch context.2. For this comparison, we need to take into account that tenure is measured on a

continuous scale in years, and external experience is subdivided in four categories.However, if we multiply the coefficient for tenure with 10 years, the correspondingamount of 7.837 euros is smaller than the amount of 11.551 for the category 5–15(average about 10) years of external experience. The same conclusion can be drawnfor the category 15–25 years of experience if we make the same calculation, anditalso applies for the outcomes for the function level.



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Appendix: OLS Estimations for Income, Job Level in 2008 and CareerMobility for Selection of Employees Who Work CompressedWorkweeks 4/36

Employees (4/36)n = 3138

Salary Job level Career mobility

Constant 45,638 9.985 Constant 5.097Female 1585*** (2.69) 0.247*** (5.14) Job level’01 −0.383*** (−38.18)Child <13 2491*** (4.39) 0.221*** (4.78) Female 0.221*** (6.7)Single −2494*** (−3.74) −0.202*** (−3.72) Change in children 0.061*** (3.40)Above-average

appraisal2440*** (4.20) 0.152*** (3.21) Change in FTE 1.238*** (3.18)

Sick >12 −3612*** (−6.32) −0.316*** (−6.78) Tenure −0.031*** (−15.07)Tenure 708*** (19.36) 0.013*** (4.20) Job exp. 5–15 −0.193*** (−5.55)Job exp. 5–15 8741*** (14.38) 0.380*** (7.67) Job exp. 15–25 −0.424*** (−8.25)Job exp. 15–25 14,695*** (16.42) 0.499*** (6.84) Job exp. 25+ −0.734*** (−6.03)Job exp. 25+ 17,110*** (7.79) 0.474*** (2.65) Change

commuting km0.001*** (2.60)

Commute 30–50 km 1291** (2.27) 0.075* (1.6) Relocated toAmsterdam

0.203 (4.98)

Commute >50 km 1965*** (2.84) 0.148*** (2.64)Not in Amsterdam = 1 −2858*** (−5.70) −0.309*** (−7.57)Adjusted R2 0.159 0.078 Adjusted R2 0.480

* significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1% (t-values in parentheses).



clilmbing the ladder, gender-specific career advancement.pdf

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