Champaign, IL, USA. Women can make inroads into male-dominated management ranks as downsizing companies restructure their scaled-back workforces. John Dencker is surprised because downsizing whittles the job pool available for both men and women, but also shows that firms apparently make an effort to balance gender inequities during staff shakeups.

John Dencker, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says "It might be that they try to make up for past inequalities or they may be aware of other firms that have had legal difficulties and want to make sure they don’t run into the same problems.”

 

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Corporate Restructuring and Sex Differences in Managerial Promotion. John C. Dencker. ASR 73(3) 455-476(22). ISSN: 0003-1224.

But women’s sharp gains during downsizing are short lived, said Dencker,

 

“Everybody’s rates of promotions slowed after downsizing because there simply weren’t as many positions to promote people into,” Dencker said. “With fewer positions available, promoting women more rapidly than men would be more visible and the company may have been concerned about how male managers would react.”

 

Overall, women accounted for nearly 36 percent of the company’s managers after restructuring, compared with an average of about 24 percent during the period from 1967 to 1993, according to the study.

 

But Dencker said women made less headway into top levels of management, composing about 17 percent of the highest salary grade level after restructuring compared with an average of about 11 percent during the 26 years studied.

 

He says a host of factors slowed the climb up the corporate ladder for women, who make up half of the nation’s management workforce but hold only 15 percent of top leadership positions.

 

Along with the decreased pool of jobs after downsizing, Dencker says women also began their management careers in lower-tier jobs, so they have farther to climb.

“There remains this sort of glass-ceiling effect,” he said. “Women have more rungs to climb, so their rates of promotion relative to men slow as they move up the corporate ladder.”

 

Parity is likely 15 or 20 years away, but Dencker says he is more optimistic that women will close the gap than he was a decade ago.

 

“I think women are going to keep pushing higher and higher up organizational ladders,” he said. “As far as CEO-level positions, I think it will be easier once it reaches critical mass. But that’s a long way off.”

 

Corporate Restructuring and Sex Differences in Managerial Promotion. John C. Dencker. ASR 73(3) 455-476(22). ISSN: 0003-1224.

Abstract

Women have made significant inroads into management in recent decades, yet remain underrepresented in leadership positions in large firms. In this article, I assess the critical but seldom analyzed role that widespread corporate restructuring may play in generating these inequalities. I build on social-cognitive research and the opportunity structure for discrimination framework to develop contrasting predictions of the effects from two forms of restructuring—reductions in force and reorganization of human resource management systems—on sex differences in managerial promotion. Analyses of longitudinal personnel records from a Fortune 500 manufacturing firm—a firm that restructured multiple times over the period examined—are consistent with the opportunity structure for discrimination framework and suggest that the firm responded to gender equity pressures to promote women when afforded the opportunity to do so. Women's promotion rates were higher than men's during restructuring, relative to previous years, with a greater difference at higher-status job levels. Importantly, however, few women transitioned into upper management positions in the firm during the restructuring period because (1) reductions in force slowed promotion rates for all managers, (2) women began their careers in lower-status jobs to begin with, relative to men, and (3) women's promotion advantages were often short-lived. I conclude by discussing implications of my findings for research on organizational dynamics and gender inequality.

 

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