Is There an Implicit Quota on Senior Women Managers? A Large Sample Statistical Analysis

Research suggests that the presence of senior women managers is self-reinforcing, implying that the presence of a woman on a top management team would increase the likelihood that another position on the same team was occupied by a woman. However, we theorize that women in top management face an implicit quota, whereby a firm’s senior managers make an effort to have small numbers of women on the top management team (usually only one) but make less effort to have, or even resist having, larger numbers of women. If so, the presence of a woman on a top management team would reduce the likelihood that another position on the same team was occupied by a woman. Using twenty years of data on the S&P 1,500 firms and a novel econometric design that compares simulated populations of top managers with the actual population, we find strong evidence in support of our theory.