Sunil Kumar, dean at the Booth School of Business, addressed the White House Summit on Working Families on June 23, 2014. Kumar told the summit that corporate leaders of the future will need to provide a supportive environment for a workforce consisting of substantially more women.
Throughout the daylong event, Kumar, who also is George Pratt Shultz Professor of Operations Management, joined legislators, businesses, economists and CEOs, for a series of panel discussions on the issues facing all types of working families—from low-wage workers to corporate executives. Hosts for the event were the Center for American Progress, the Department of Labor, and the White House Council on Women and Girls.
The centerpiece of Kumar’s panel discussion was leading-edge research by Marianne Bertrand, Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and her study, “Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors.”Published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in 2010, the research examined the compensation trajectory of some 3,000 Chicago Booth alumni over the 16 years following graduation. Bertrand found near gender parity upon graduation but that after that, compensation trajectories for men and women diverged.
“The data suggests that this effect is explained by three factors,” Kumar said. “The first two are having breaks in one’s career and working fewer hours—both of which apply mainly to women with children. The third factor is training prior to MBA graduation. The key question Bertrand’s study engenders is, ‘How can companies benefit by redesigning career paths so that career breaks and reduced hours are not penalized as they are now,’” he said.