Management Practices and Gender gaps: Mechanisms behind the Gender Gap in Career Progression (MAP-GAP)

Differences in pay and career development between men and women have narrowed over time. Women now participate in the labor force at the same rate as men, and more women than men complete higher education. However, significant gender disparities remain in senior positions within the business sector and among the highest-paid individuals. This project aims to increase our understanding of the factors that contribute to these gender differences, with a particular focus on early career stages and the role of management practices, such as task allocation in the workplace, in shaping career development. By focusing on management practices as a key mechanism, the project will provide valuable knowledge for further research and guide future developments by identifying measures that could improve gender balance in the private sector. During the first year, the project has conducted several activities, including analyses of gender differences in task allocation during the early years of employment. The research team has collected data from multiple sources, including surveys, experiments, and administrative data from five cohorts of master’s students in economics and business administration. Preliminary results indicate that women are more likely than men to perform tasks that are less important for future career advancement – so-called "Non-Promotable Tasks" – already in their first year of employment. In the second year, this difference becomes even more pronounced, particularly in larger companies and male-dominated departments. However, data collection takes time, and we currently only have labor market data for the first two cohorts. We will continue exploring this mechanism, along with other mechanisms influencing gender disparities in early career stages. Preliminary results have been presented at several international conferences, workshops, and seminars under the title "Early Onset of Gendered Work Assignments." Another sub-project investigates how guidelines for the use of AI tools in educational institutions might affect gender differences in the labor market. The study «Will Artificial Intelligence Get in the Way of Achieving Gender Equality?» shows that women, especially those with high academic performance, are less likely to use such tools compared to their male peers. As AI skills become increasingly in demand in the job market, this could exacerbate gender disparities in career progression. The project has been presented at several international conferences, workshops, and seminars and has also received considerable media attention, including coverage in The Economist. Finally, we would like to highlight a project in its initial stages that seeks to understand the role of companies in shaping inequalities, as well as employees’ perceptions of these inequalities within Norwegian society. We aim to map wage inequalities both between and within firms across Norway and develop an index to indicate how much of these disparities can be explained by differences in employees' productive characteristics. The research will shed light on how wage inequalities within companies affect job satisfaction, productivity, and turnover among employees.

Women have experienced substantial gains over the last decades in many economic areas, with reduced gender gaps in labor force participation, full-time employment, and education. However, we still see a substantial gap in terms of career achievement, particularly in high-income occupations, that is not yet well understood. MAP-GAP is a project proposal at the intersection between personnel economics and behavioral economics. We will analyze how career dynamics are affected by gender differences in beliefs, preferences, and psychological traits, and their interaction with firm practices and gender attitudes among managers. We propose two work packages. First, we investigate if gender differences in the early career years of MBA graduates are driven by management practices that result in a gender imbalance in the allocation of promotable tasks. Next, we ask if implicit stereotypes among managers hinder female career progression, if high quality management is associated with better gender diversity, and if stereotyping is a barrier to the adoption of good management practices. MAP-GAP creatively combine different types of data to take evidence from influential experimental studies and test the findings in a real workplace. Registry data provide detailed information on two important domains: Detailed information on educational background as well as detailed information about labor market choices and outcomes. Experiments and surveys, on the other hand, can provide new understandings of the underlying mechanisms behind the gender gaps. We will elicit individual-level information on career aspirations, beliefs, preferences and psychological attributes as well as task volunteering and allocation for a several cohorts of selected study programs, and firm level data on management practices. This combination of data sources will allow us to advance our knowledge and provide important evidence for a better understanding of the gender differences in the labor market.