Mentoring and Diversity
By Susan Athey, Christopher Avery, Peter Zemsky. 2000
267 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper studies the forces which determine how diversity at a firm evolves over time. We consider a dynamic model o a single firm with two levels of employees, the entry level and the upper level. In each period, the firm selects a subset of the entry-level workers for promotion to the upper level. The members of the entry-level worker pool vary in their initial ability as well as in their type,' where type could refer to gender or cultural background. Employees augment their initial ability by acquiring specific human capital in mentoring interactions with upper level employees. We assume that an entry-level worker receives more mentoring when a greater proportion of upper-level workers match the entry-level worker's type. In this model, it is optimal for the firm to consider type in addition to ability in making promotion decisions, so as to maximize the effectiveness of future mentoring. We derived conditions under which firms attain full diversity, as well as conditions under which there are multiple steady states, so that the level of diversity depends on the firm's initial conditions. With multiple steady states, temporary affirmative action policies can have a long-run impact on diversity levels.
Subfields: Education, Gender Studies, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f27d43ac7dd4b2ceb7dc942e832a450e23bdcde8
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Citations in the corpus
- Do Female Executives Make a Difference? The Impact of Female Leadership on Gender Gaps and Firm Performance (2019, unknown): “For contributions focusing on both executive and firm characteristics, see Bandiera et al. (2015) and Lippi and Schivardi (2014). (2)For an overview of the gender gap in the U.S. labor market in the last twenty years, see Blau and Kahn (2006), Eckstein and Nagypal (2004) and Flabbi (2010). (3)Eviden”
- Civic Engagement and Community Heterogeneity: An Economist's Perspective (2003, unknown): “30 Athey et al. 2000.”
- Women-Led Firms and the Gender Gap in Top Executive Jobs (2005, unknown): “…firms are more likely to have both a woman CEO and/or Board Chair and more top women employees at higher pay, then the association between women-leaders and the gender pay gap might be due to unmeasured characteristics of companies and incorrectly attributed to the leaders that head them.”
- Does Mentor Support Increase Women's Career Advancement More than Men's? The Differential Effects of Career and Psychosocial Support (2005, background): “…established some mentor programs specifically to help women and others underrepresented in management to advance, acknowledging that women may have more family, organisational, and interpersonal barriers to their hierarchical advancement than men do (Clutterbuck & Ragins 2002; Blake-Beard 2001).”
- Faculty-graduate student mentoring relationships: mentors’ perceived roles and responsibilities (2011, background): “Research has shown that mentoring relationships are more authentic when mentors and mentees share similar cultural experiences, language, and interests (Athey et al. 2000).”
- Chipping Away at the Glass Ceiling: Gender Spillovers in Corporate Leadership (2011, unknown): “Evidence from Quotas.””
- Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, unknown): “We find that women lose the most when they negotiate with male leaders, a result that points to female representation in leadership as a way to combat gender inequality in the workplace (Matsa and Miller, 2011; Athey et al., 2000; Langan, 2019).”
- Glass Ceilings or Sticky Floors? Statistical Discrimination in a Dynamic Model of Hiring and Promotion (2008, unknown): “4Another paper of related interest is Athey, Avery, and Zemsky (2000) , whose work is also applicable to understanding glass ceiling type phenomena.”