Gender Differences in Workplace Authority: Discrimination and the Role of Organizational Leaders

Abstract

This paper examines to what extent discrimination accounts for inequalities in authority exertion between women and men in the Swedish labour-market. Processes governing authority attainment are studied in terms of human capital and family responsibilities as well as of the horizontal sex segregation in the labour-market. The empirical results strongly indicate that women are being unduly restricted from attaining supervisory positions at work, primarily within the private sector of the economy. The assumption that discrimination is brought about by decision-makers within work organizations was tentatively tested and proved not to hold, since it was determined that neither women's nor men's chances to reach higher supervisory positions are affected by the sex of the highest workplace manager. The analyses are based upon data from the 1991 Swedish Level of Living Survey and the 1991 Swedish Establishment Survey on a sample of 2017 employees.

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