Why having a female boss can hit women’s promotion hopes

IF YOU’RE a woman looking to get to the top of your profession, try to avoid having a female boss.

Because if your firm already has a woman manager, your chances of promotion have just plummeted, a study shows.

Researchers found companies work hard to get one woman into a managerial position but once that happens the chances of another following in her footsteps halve.

The study, published in Strategic Management Journal, analysed the top tiers of 1,500 firms from 1991 to 2011. The authors from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and Columbia Business School could not say for sure whether the ‘quota effect’ was a conscious or unconscious decision.

University of Maryland associate professor Cristian Desz said: ‘Once a company had appointed one woman to a top-tier job, the chances of a second woman landing an elite position at the same firm drop substantially, by about 50 per cent, in fact. We thought that the hiring of one woman would lead to a snowball effect at a given company. In fact, what we find is exactly the opposite.

‘Once they had appointed one woman, the men seem to have said, “We have done our job.” This may be because the men feel that such an appointment already puts them ahead of most companies, which is true.’ They rejected the possibility of a ‘queen bee’ effect, in which the first executive-level women hired would perceive other women as rivals, and work against hiring more.

In fact companies with a female CEO did slightly better at hiring a second woman than those with a woman in a different senior position. The team drew on data from a Standard & Poor’s database, supplemented with other sources. They used mathematical formulas to study the distribution of top female executives across the companies in their sample.

Although women make up nearly half of the workforce, just 8.7 per cent of top managers were female in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics – slightly up from 5.8 per cent who held such positions in 2000.

Other reasons the researcher suggested for the pattern of one woman executive in a firm, were that men feel that there are diminishing returns to hiring more females.

In other words, they think one is enough to attract media attention, represent the company at ‘diversity’ events, and satisfy activists pressuring the company.

Or men may perceive the first, pathbreaking women as utterly unique and subsequent female employees just do not measure up.

Professor Desz added: ‘One implication of the study is that activists promoting the presence of women in executive suites can’t move on from a given company after one woman is hired. They need to keep up the pressure or even apply more pressure.’

‘Chances drop substantially’