Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labour Market Outcomes in Norway

By Marianne Bertrand, Sandra E. Black, Sissel Jensen, A. Lleras-Muney. The Review of Economic Studies, 2014

551 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35ef5040ef35c5a56dfd1b311067d595da85ebe6

Citations in the corpus

• Do Female Executives Make a Difference? The Impact of Female Leadership on Gender Gaps and Firm Performance (2019, unknown): “Bertrand et al. (2018) show that a reform mandating gender quotas for the boards of Norwegian companies reduced the gender gap in earnings within board members but did not have a significant impact on overall gender wage gaps.”
• Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, unknown): “While studies of the effects of gender quotas for firm boards generally do not find any positive impact for women in other parts of the organization (Bertrand et al., 2019; Maida and Weber, 2019), other works have unveiled a positive impact of having a female non-board manager on women’s careers (Sa”
• Women Helping Women? Evidence from Private Sector Data on Workplace Hierarchies (2017, unknown): “Using more recent data around the time of the quota’s proposal and adoption, Bertrand et al. (2014) find limited gender spillover effects of the quota on top managers and no statistically significant gender spillovers on the overall workforce.”
• Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams* (2018, unknown): “What may be required is exposure to female leaders at the relevant level (Beaman et al., 2009; Bertrand et al., 2014).”
• Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers (2017, unknown): “9 Manning and Swaffield (2008) and Bertrand et al. (2010) find that there is no gender-based earnings gap at the outset of young professionals’ careers but that their earnings diverge ten years after graduation.”
• Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter? (2017, unknown): “A related literature also analyses the role of evaluators’ gender in non academic occupations (Bagues and Esteve-Volart 2010, Bertrand et al. 2014, Booth and Leigh 2010, Kunze and Miller 2015), in sport activities (Sandberg 2014) or in the lab (Bohnet, van Geen and Bazerman 2015). In general, in the”