The Old Boy Network: Gender Differences in the Impact of Social Networks on Remuneration in Top Executive Jobs

Marie Lalanne · Paul Seabright

32 citations0/0 files storedRePEc: Research Papers in Economics

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gender Diversity and Inequality Labor market dynamics and wage inequality Labour Market and Migration

Abstract

Using an original dataset describing the career history of some 16,000 senior executives and members of the non-executive board of US, UK, French and German companies, we investigate gender differences in the use of social networks and their impact on earnings.There is a large gender wage gap: women (who make up 8.8% of our sample) earned average salaries of $168,000 in 2008, only 70% of the average $241,000 earned by men.This is not due to differences in age, experience or education levels.Women are more likely than men to be non-executives, whose salaries are lower; nevertheless, a substantial gender gap still exists among executives.We construct measures of the number of currently influential people each individual has encountered previously in his or her career.We find that executive men's salaries are an increasing function of the number of such individuals they have encountered in the past while women's are not.Controlling for this discrepancy, there is no longer a significant gender gap among executives.These findings are robust to the use of different years, to the use of salaried versus non-salaried remuneration, and to the use of panel estimation to control rigorously for unobserved individual heterogeneity.In contrast to executives, the salaries of non-executive board members do not display a significant gender wage gap, nor any gender difference in the effectiveness with which men and women leverage their links into salaries.This suggests that adoption of gender quotas for board membership, as has been enacted or proposed recently in several European countries, is unlikely to reduce the gender gap in earnings so long as such quotas do not distinguish between executive and non-executive board members.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

References

1973The Strength of Weak Ties 1991Some Tests of Specification for Panel Data: Monte Carlo Evidence and an Application to Employment Equations 1995Another look at the instrumental variable estimation of error-components models 2001Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks 1995Initial conditions and moment restrictions in dynamic panel data models 1988Estimating Vector Autoregressions with Panel Data 1981Estimation of Dynamic Models with Error Components 1993Personal Networks of Women and Minorities in Management: A Conceptual Framework

Cited by

2017Beyond the revolving door: Advocacy behavior and social distance to financial regulators 2022Executive social connections and gender pay gaps 2019Same job, different rewards: The gender pay gap among physicians in Italy 2016Explaining vertical gender segregation: a research agenda 2024Navigating turbulence in the UK: how gender shapes self-employed social engagement during crises?

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.