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The purpose of the paper is to analyse how the male-female pay gap in China varies across the pay distribution and to provide evidence on the factors that influence that gap.

The authors use the Recentered Influence Function modification of quantile regressions to estimate how the male-female pay gap varies across the pay distribution. The authors also decompose the pay gaps at different quantiles of the pay distribution into differences in endowments of wage determining characteristics and differences in the returns for the same characteristics. The analysis is based on data from the Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China survey.

The authors find evidence of a sticky floor (large pay gaps at the bottom of the pay distribution) and some limited and weaker evidence of a glass ceiling (large pay gaps at the top of the distribution). This pattern prevails based on the overall pay gap as well as on the adjusted or net gap that reflects differences in the pay that males and females receive when they have the same pay determining characteristics. The pattern largely reflects the coefficients or unexplained differences across the pay distribution. Factors influencing the pay gap and how they vary across the pay distribution are discussed. The variation highlights considerable heterogeneity in the Chinese labour market with respect to how pay is determined and different characteristics are rewarded, implying that the conventional Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions that focus only on the mean of the distribution can mask important differences across the full pay distribution.

At the bottom of the pay distribution most of the lower pay of females reflects their lower returns to job tenure, experience and a greater negative effect of family responsibilities on females’ wages, and to a lesser extent their lower level of education, less likelihood of being CPP members and their concentration in lower paying occupations. At the top of the pay distribution most of their lower pay reflects their lower returns on education, job tenure and work experience, and to a lesser extent their lower levels of experience and lower likelihood of being in managerial and leadership positions.

The paper systematically examines the male-female pay gap and its determinants throughout the pay distribution in China, highlighting that the conventional Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions that focus only on the mean of the distribution can mask important differences across the full pay distribution and not capture the considerable heterogeneity in that labour market.

In this paper the aim is to focus on the individual distribution of gender wage discrimination in Spain and Italy, relying upon the development of Jenkins' distributional approach proposed in Del Rio et al.

The authors estimate the degree of individual discrimination for each employed woman and, relying on the decomposability properties of these estimates, assess the nature and extent of discrimination across various socio‐economic groupings.

Some mechanisms inhibit the access of highly educated women to highly rewarding occupations in Italy, especially in the public sector, but not in Spain.

The treatment of occupation and sector of activity has some impact on the results, shedding doubt on the robustness of some previous analyses of discrimination in these countries.

While no doubt the appraisal of the glass ceiling in the Italian labour market will gain extensively from further research, some prima facie evidence is found highlighting the role of appointment and promotion procedures.

A remarkable institutional divide characterises Spain and Italy in the domain of gender wage discrimination. Powerful political pressure along the lines of gender quotas for public employment has long been in place in Spain, while nothing of the kind has existed in Italy.

This study aims to analyse the gender pay gap among CEOs, VPs and potential top executives. The authors seek to analyse how much of the gap is explained by differences in individual characteristics and how much is explained by firm characteristics and discriminatory processes.

The paper estimates compensation functions based on a panel of employer‐employee data set covering all Danish companies in the private sector with more than 50 employees during the period 1996‐2005.

The authors document that when controlling for a large number of observable characteristics and time‐invariant characteristics, there still exists a large gender compensation gap among top executives in Denmark. For VP and potential top executives, the estimated gap increased during the period 1996‐2005 while for the small and selected group of CEOs, the corrected gender gap decreased slightly.

The study does not claim to identify causal links between top executive compensation and individual or firm specific background characteristics.

The extension of the family‐friendly schemes may have had negative boomerang effects on the compensation and careers of all women, irrespective of whether they become mothers or not. Especially for those women aiming to reach the top of the organisation, these effects may be important because potential career interruptions are expected to be more severe for this group.

This study adds to the limited empirical literature on the gender pay gap among the narrow group of top executives using a large panel employer‐employee data set of all Danish companies.

This paper aims to analyse the magnitude of the gender wage disparity in the public and private sectors in Mauritius across both mean differentials and overall wage distribution. The paper then decomposed the gender wage differential using the Oaxaca and Blinder (1973) decomposition technique.

The study uses cross-sectional data from the Continuous Multi-Purpose Household Budget Survey (CMPHS), from 2006 to 2013. The sample size on average is around 12,000 households surveyed per year.

The results reveal that that gender wage differentials are prevalent in both economic sectors; however, the disparity is more pronounced in the private sector. In addition, the differences in wages are larger at the bottom compared to the top end of the wage distribution, suggesting the presence of sticky floors. Lastly, it was observed that the unexplained wage gap (discrimination) is higher in the private sector than in public sector across the years.

The literature on the gender wage gap in Africa is limited. This paper adds to the existing literature on gender wage differential with an analysis of the gender wage disparity across the public and private sectors in Mauritius.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Women have made great advances in leadership roles over the past decade; however, there are still many challenges to be faced and overcome before there is equality with men. The labyrinth metaphor is a useful one, as it represents the challenges and opportunities women may face along their career path, not just at a single point.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Strengths-based coaching has emerged in past decades as an asset-based approach that can help individuals identify, harness, and leverage their strengths to achieve professional and personal goals. This paper shares the design and outcomes of a year-long strengths-based coaching program to support leadership development within the context of one university’s women’s leadership initiative.

Program outcomes and changes in participants’ perceived confidence in identifying and applying their strengths in different contexts were evaluated through an online survey using a Likert-based REDCap survey tool after participation in the program. Findings strongly suggest that most participants lacked the self-confidence and/or self-awareness to recognize their own strengths in a granular way prior to the program. Themes that emerged in the survey findings point to the following program outcomes: participants gained an increased ability to identify and value one’s own leadership strengths, an increased ability to recognize and value the strengths of others, and a supportive community of women leaders to share experiences and reflect on the application of their strengths as part of their leadership journey.

Further studies are needed to understand and measure how a program such as this can impact one’s leader identity, self-awareness, and self-confidence. Given the critical need for women’s leadership opportunities, this program shows promise as a means to strengthen women’s leadership across career stages and disciplines.

The author proposes analyzing the dynamics of income positions using dynamic panel ordered probit models. The author disentangles, simultaneously, the roles of state dependence and heterogeneity (observed and non-observed) in explaining income position persistence, such as poverty persistence and affluence persistence. The author applies the approach to Chile exploiting longitudinal data from the P-CASEN 2006–2009. First, the author finds that income position mobility at the bottom and the top of the income distribution is much higher than expected, showing signs that income mobility in the case of Chile might be connected to economic insecurity. Second, the observable individual characteristics have a much stronger impact than true state dependence to explain individuals’ current income position in the income distribution extremes.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the gender wage differential at different points of the wage distribution. It investigates the existence of glass ceilings and sticky floors in the Mauritian labour market. There is no previous empirical work studying gender inequality in the labour market for the small island economy of Mauritius.

To investigate whether wage differentials are higher at the top or bottom ends of the wage distribution, the authors examine the wage disparities across different quantiles of the wage distribution. The gender wage disparities are assessed using quantile regression and decomposition techniques at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th quantiles. Survey data from the Continuous Multi-Purpose Household Survey from 2006 to 2013 is used.

The results reveal that sticky floors are more pronounced than glass ceilings over the years. Further, for the years 2008, 2010 and 2012, it is noted that at the 75th quantiles, the gender wage differentials started to rise showing glass ceiling effects. The combination of both sticky floors and glass ceilings are characterised by the unexplained factors providing evidence for gender discrimination in the Mauritian labour market.

This is the first study analysing the glass ceilings or sticky floors in the Mauritian labour market. Though the research is limited to Mauritius, the latter being a small island economy can serve as a case study for other island economies and also for the African continent.

The glass ceiling is a metaphor used to characterize the gender inequality of women at the top in most large western organizations. This situation has prompted many business organizations, NGOs and governments to encourage large organizations to promote more women into the executive suite and onto boards of directors. While there is little controversy about this initiative, this paper argues that there should be because it directly challenges the principle that merit should outweigh diversity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper reviews research that purports to show that women are unfairly under-represented in the most senior positions in large western organizations. It also reviews the arguments that more senior women would improve the performance of these organizations. This research is then used to develop a model of why there are markedly fewer women than men at the top of large organizations.

This study finds that most of the research studies purporting to show that there is a bias against promoting women to the top of large western organizations are unsound because they are poorly designed and/or fail to accommodate alternative explanations for this effect. Thus, the current number of women who run these organizations may be a good reflection of their contribution to the management of these organizations. These findings suggest that many of the policies that are promoted to help women break through the glass ceiling are misguided.

Large organizations should think carefully about following the advice of special interest groups who vigorously promote this social cause.

Social policy advocates need better research from which to advance their cause that there are currently too few women in senior management positions of large organizations.

This is one of only a handful of papers that challenges the current orthodoxy that artificial glass ceilings are restricting the potential contribution of women to the better management of large organizations.