Former Hewlett Packard Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina was dismissed from her executive position in 2005. This event garnered a great deal of attention, and in part inspired Oregon State U. professor John Becker-Blease’s new study on women executives and their departures.
Becker-Blease, an assistant professor in the College of Business at OSU, found that women executives are at least twice as likely to leave their jobs than male executives, on both a voluntarily and involuntarily basis. In his study, published in the journal Economic Inquiry, Becker-Blease and his colleagues examined figures from a database, which included information on high-level executives from the largest 1500 companies in the United States economy.
“For each company, we had data on the top five highest paid executives, and we’d look for executives that dropped off the list,” Becker-Blease said. “Those were not immediately identified as executive departures, but only as a starting point. We would look in media, newspaper reports and press announcements, searching for the executive’s name and stories related to particular companies.”
A careful examination of the data revealed that around 7.2 percent of women executives in the survey departed from their positions, compared to 3.8 percent of male executives leaving their jobs. These results, when divided into the categories of voluntary or involuntary, maintained their unbalanced ratio. However, Becker-Blease said that there were no specific patterns of discrimination in the data.
“Involuntary departures include instances where the person was fired, or where the person left effective immediately and the company was in financial trouble,” Becker-Blease said. “Also, if the person was under investigation for criminal activity, we considered that to be a firing.”
Voluntary departures were categorized based on a variety of aspects. Becker-Blease explained that these could include someone leaving to pursue another interest, making a personal transition or accepting another job at a particular company. In the last case, the possibility exists that the person in question might have been fired anyway, but the fact that they were given the opportunity to resign makes them voluntary cases.
Accurately determining these circumstances for individual executives was not always an easy task.
“It was a challenging study to execute because companies generally don’t reveal why someone is leaving,” Becker-Blease said. “We couldn’t just read an article and find the answer. If the article said this person was fired, or this person has decided to pursue other interests immediately, is that because someone’s been fired or did they just say they were leaving? We knew we would have a hard time and so we were fairly cautious in how we interpreted what we found.”
Studies of this nature are often challenging, though revealing. Becker-Blease mentioned that there are few studies in existence that examine females in positions of power. One researcher that has tackled these issues, David Baldridge of OSU’s College of Business, conducted several studies that dealt with gender in the workplace.
One of his 2006 studies focused on women in the workplace and the impact of family on their willingness to relocate for their jobs. Results showed that women were indeed less willing to move to a new location than the men who were faced with the same choice, and family impacts this discovered reluctance. Another of his studies, from 2004, addressed a topic that ties into Becker-Blease’s study.
“We were looking at different things that impact career success for men or women,” Baldridge said. “We found that mentoring increased marketability for both genders.”
According to the study, though, women managers did not receive more frequent promotions in conjunction with mentoring, while men did see more promotions after participating in mentoring. These results emphasize another gender imbalance in the workplace.
Andrea Doyle, a graduate student in women studies, spoke of these imbalances by referring to the “glass ceiling” and the “glass precipice.”
“Basically, the glass ceiling is this invisible barrier that prevents women from being promoted because of a male-dominated environment,” Doyle said. “When women finally do break through the glass ceiling and reach leadership, it might be offered in times when companies are already failing and women are supposed to fix these companies.”
Having surpassed the glass ceiling, Doyle said, women may find themselves on top of a fragile glass precipice that makes it difficult for them to remain there for very long. She expressed concerns that discrimination against females in the workplace might be overlooked in research.
“The biggest obstacle we have to face is that sexual discrimination is so ingrained in everyday situations that it often goes unnoticed,” Doyle said. “It’s not obvious to those not experiencing it, but it could have been obvious to the women experiencing it. It’s important to remain conscious of discrimination and know that sometimes it does inhibit women from being in executive level positions in the workplace.”
However, Becker-Blease was encouraged by the results of the study in that it showed no clear patterns of discrimination, and he would like to see more studies of this kind conducted.
“Generally speaking, we’re heartened by the overall pattern,” Becker-Blease said. “There are getting to be more and more women executives out there, so there’s not all bad news in what we found.”