Having Female Managers at the Top Does Raise Women's Salaries - Building Gender Balanced Business

Here’s the proof: Women earn substantially more money and the wage gap shrinks when other women in their companies make it into the top management ranks.

• The report “Working for the Woman” confirmed that US women earn about 81 percent of what men make. Even if more than half of the junior management of a company is female, that gender gap remains strong.

• But when women become senior managers, female workers earn 91 percent of men’s salaries.

• Men who work for female managers seem to do slightly worse in income than men who work for men, irrespective of whether the women managers are in senior positions. That may be because female managers tend to predominate in industries where women are the majority of workers, and those industries tend to pay less on average.

• The study — by Philip N. Cohen of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Matt L. Huffman of University of California, Irvine — was based on 1.3 million US workers in nearly 30,000 jobs and 79 metropolitan areas.

• The authors write, “[O]ur findings may temper the optimism generated by the rapid increase in the proportion of women in management in the last several decades. … [I]nroads made by women into upper-status managerial positions will ‘lift all boats’. … We conclude that the promotion of women into management positions may benefit all women, but only if female managers reach relatively high-status positions.”

The 23-page ‘Working for the Woman’ report