Booth Sponsored Panel Discusses Women’s Place in Business
Two leading women economists discussed how, despite being well represented across graduate and professional schools, women are still finding relative difficulty in attaining the top positions in corporations and high finance.
Marianne Bertrand, Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, and Gertrude Tumpel-Gugerell, an Austrian economist, former executive board member for the European Central Bank, and chairwoman, Supervisory Board of Commerzbank AG, spoke at the Chicago Booth School of Business sponsored panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland, on January 24 titled “Breaking the Glass Ceiling.”Bertrand explained that traditional domestic concerns likely impede the progress of many women, even while most top positions in finance and business require long hours, a lot of traveling, and huge penalties for both men and women if they take time off the fast track.
“Despite some changes, it’s still true today that women are disproportionately in charge of everything that has to do with home activities, particularly childrearing,” Bertrand said. “These jobs in finance and business are not easily combined with a flexible schedule of taking time off.” Bertrand’s recent research has focused on women in the workplace and how they balance family pressures.
Bertrand and Tumpel-Gugerell also emphasized that educational paths, hiring quotas and mentoring programs for women all play pivotal roles in shifting the current male-centric business world.
Tumpel-Gugerell offered recruitment bias as one explanation: “I’ve sat on many recruitment panels, and even with an elaborate process, men tend to recruit candidates who are similar to them—they feel that they will assimilate better.”
“In education today, we have roughly 50 percent women in law school, 50 percent of medical students are women, and business school is not that far behind—around 40 to 45 percent are women,” Bertrand said. “A century ago, it was easy to explain why there were so few women at the top. Women simply didn’t match men in terms of education. But that’s not the case now. There’s something going on after women reach the labor market.”
