Promotion chances amongst females half if boss is also female?

If you are a female with ambitions of getting a promotion, then your chances of rising to the top halve if your superior is also a female.

Researchers discovered that companies work hard to get one women into a senior position, but once this is achieved then the odds of another joining her halve.

The study, published in Strategic Management Journal, analysed the top tiers of 1,500 firms from 1991 to 2011. The authors said “We thought that the hiring of one woman would lead to a snowball effect at a given company. In fact, what we find is exactly the opposite.”

Despite the fact that women make up just under half of the workforce, only 8.7% of top managers were female in 2011, slightly up from 5.8% who held such positions in 2000.

The research suggested that men feel there are diminishing returns to hiring more females, and that, once the company has been seen as ‘diverse’ that activists appetite for equality is sated.

The authors added that “One implication of the study is that activists promoting the presence of women in executive suites can’t move on from a given company after one woman is hired. They need to keep up the pressure or even apply more pressure.”

The data was primarily drawn from a Standard & Poor’s database, with mathematical formulas used to examine the distribution of top female executives amongst the data sample.