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In this paper we use a large linked employer-employee data set on German establishments between 1993 and 2012 to investigate how the gender composition of the top layer of management affects a variety of establishment and worker outcomes. We use two different measures to identify the gender composition of the top layer based on direct survey data: the fraction of women among top managers, and the fraction of women among working proprietors. We document the following facts: (a) There is a strong negative association between the fraction of women in the top layer of management and several establishment outcomes, among them business volume, investment, total wage bill per worker, total employment, and turnover; (b) Establishments with a high fraction of women in the top layer of management are more likely to implement female-friendly policies, such as providing childcare facilities or promoting and mentoring female junior staff; (c) The fraction of women in the top layer of management is also negatively associated with employment and wages, both male and female, full-time and part-time. However, all of these associations vanish when we include establishment fixed effects and establishment-specific time trends. This reveals a substantial sorting of female managers across establishments: small and less productive establishments that invest less, pay their employees lower wages, but are more female-friendly are more likely to be led by women.

The purpose of this study is to examine linkages of gender and gender-related variables to aspirations to top management over a period spanning five decades.

During each of the past five decades, samples from two early-career populations (n = 2131), undergraduate business students and part-time (evening) MBAs, completed an aspirations to top management measure and described themselves on an instrument that assessed self-ascribed masculinity and femininity.

Aspirations to top management were predicted by respondent gender for undergraduates, with women’s aspirations lower than those of men, and by masculinity for both populations. Suggesting a shifting role of gender, undergraduate women’s aspirations to top management declined during the 21st century, whereas undergraduate men’s aspirations did not.

Any decline in early-career women’s aspirations to top management over a sustained period may contribute in the long run to perpetuating the under-representation of women in top management.

The finding of a striking decline in women’s aspirations to top management during the 21st century in an early-career population is an original contribution to the gender in management literature.

This paper aims to investigate how gender diversity in top management – i.e. boardroom and top management positions – affects business performance among Colombian public businesses.

Building on the upper echelon theory which emphasizes that gender in an important characteristic that influences top management’s decision-making, panel data models are used on a sample of 54 Colombian public businesses for the period 2008-2015 to test the proposed hypotheses relating to gender diversity and subsequent business performance.

The results support that gender diversity is positively associated with subsequent business performance. More concretely, the relationship between gender diversity at the top of the corporate hierarchy – in the present case, as CEO and in the top management team – and subsequent performance becomes more evident when performance is linked to business operations (ROA), whereas the positive effect of women’s representation in the boardroom and subsequent performance is significant when performance is measured via shareholder-oriented metrics (ROE).

Few studies have addressed the role of gender diversity on performance in developing economies. This study contributes to better understand how gender diversity affects performance in contexts where women are underrepresented in the top management, and where the appointment of women directors or managers is not driven by regulatory pressures.

Although 40 per cent of US managers are women, only about 5 per cent of the top level managers are women. Middle and top level women managers were surveyed by a questionnaire. Nearly all say women are under‐represented in their firms, mainly because the men at the top are reluctant to promote them. As a remedy, education was preferred over legal measures. Key barriers include: managers′ stereotypes about women′s credibility, career commitment, and decision‐making ability; various subtle forms of exclusion. Key techniques for overcoming the barriers include: skills in communicating, problem solving, decision making, motivating, delegating, and supervising; understanding the firm, its people, and its politics; co‐operating as a team member; developing personal power (poise, inner resources).

This paper aims to examine the relationship between management diversity and firm performance in the case of women in top executive jobs and on boards of directors. Corporate governance literature argues that board diversity is potentially positively related to firm performance. This hypothesis is tested in the paper.

In this paper with the use of data for the 2,500 largest Danish firms observed during the period 1993‐2001 various statistical models for firm performance are specified and estimated. The main focus in the models is the estimated relationship between the proportion of women in top management (CEOs and on boards of directors) and firm performance.

The results in this paper show that the proportion of women in top management jobs tends to have positive effects on firm performance, even after controlling for numerous characteristics of the firm and direction of causality. The results show that the positive effects of women in top management strongly depend on the qualifications of female top managers.

This paper provides solid statistical evidence of the effects of women in top management on firm performance. The use of a large sample and the panel nature of the data set make it possible to properly control for direction of causality and, furthermore, much firm and individual information is included to estimate genuine effects of women in top management.

The purpose of this article is to offer a multi-layered approach to gender topics in top management team research.

Recent empirical work on the role of gender diversity in top management teams will be reviewed and contrasted with gender and diversity theory.

The results show that gender diversity has often been operationalized and defined in a highly stereotypical fashion, strongly rooted in assumed biological traits (in particular male/female skills and aptitudes). This very simplistic assumption that men and women behave differently does not take into account gender and diversity theories, but simply reproduces gender stereotypes. As a result, a framework is presented that takes societal, organizational, group and individual variables into account to understand the impact of gender in top management positions.

The paper is a conceptual paper aiming at enriching scholarly work on gender and top management teams by considering several potentially gendered processes on different layers: society, organizations, groups and individuals.

This concept is the first to offer a fresh perspective on the intensively researched topic of gender and performance in top management. By overcoming the stereotypical view that the contributions of female and male managers are inherently different, the paper aims to enrich the scholarly debate on relevant top management characteristics, and furthermore ensure that discriminatory ascriptions to female and male managers are not reproduced through academic work.

Data gathered by the authors from undergraduate and part‐time graduate business students in 1976‐1977 suggested that men were more likely than women to aspire to top management and that, consistent with traditional stereotypes of males and managers, a gender identity consisting of high masculinity and low femininity was associated with aspirations to top management. As a result of gender‐related social changes, we expected the gender difference in aspirations to top management but not the importance of gender identity to have decreased over time. We collected data in 1999 from the same two populations to test these notions. In newly collected data, high masculinity (but not low femininity) was still associated with such aspirations, and men still aspired to top management positions more than women. However, the gender difference in aspirations to top management did not decrease over time.

The purpose of this paper is to provide better understanding of women's career advancement to top management and their future aspirations to become entrepreneurs.

The paper's approach is qualitative research hermeneutic phenomenology.

Women's career experiences predisposed them to find an alternate route, entrepreneurship, despite having achieved top management.

Understanding factors that successfully contribute to the development of women entrepreneurs from a career development perspective is a critical endeavor for any type of organization. This qualitative research is limited to US for‐profit organizations.

The value of this paper is that it provides a unique way to look at the career development for women from those who reached top management and their motivations to become entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the current status of women in management and explanations offered for this status in light of a rare empirical field study of the “glass ceiling” phenomenon the authors conducted about 20 years ago.

The authors review the study’s key arguments, unexpected results, and implications for organizational effectiveness (which have been largely ignored). The authors then review what has transpired and what has been learned about the glass ceiling phenomenon since.

The nature of glass ceilings has remained essentially stable over a 20-year period, although further explanations for them have flourished.

More scholarly examinations of ways to shatter glass ceilings and thereby enhance organizational effectiveness are recommended.

Organizations, human resources directors, and internal decision makers need to adopt practices that foster “debiasing” of decisions about promotions to top management.

Societies need to encourage organizations to adopt ways to shatter glass ceilings that continue to disadvantage women.

A systematic review and analysis of the present-day implications of an early study of the glass ceiling phenomenon has not previously been conducted.

During the late 1970s and 1980s unprecedented numbers of women managers attempted to reach the top of corporate hierarchies. Evaluation of their progress suggests that, in spite of the proliferation of programmes and books aimed at women managers, women rarely attain executive level positions. Indeed, currently, there is evidence in the literature to suggest that they are “giving up the fight” and “dropping out of the race”. The research related to this “dropout” syndrome, the implications of this research, and the challenges it presents to management educators are considered.