Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway

Marianne Bertrand, Sandra Black, Sissel Jensen and Adriana Lleras-Muney

No 28/2014, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members.

Keywords: Gender discrimination; board of directors. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2014-08-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-hme, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (94)

Downloads: (external link)
http://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/217672/1/workingpaper.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to brage.bibsys.no:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labour Market Outcomes in Norway (2019)
Working Paper: Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway (2014)
Working Paper: Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labor Market Outcomes in Norway (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2014_028

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics NHH, Department of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Karen Reed-Larsen ().