Climbing the Ladder: Gender‐Specific Career Advancement in Financial Services and the Influence of Flexible Work‐Time Arrangements

Published date01 March 2016
AuthorLourens Broersma,Jouke Dijk,Inge Noback
Date01 March 2016
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12048
Climbing the Ladder: Gender-Specific
Career Advancement in Financial
Services and the Influence of Flexible
Work-Time Arrangements
Inge Noback, Lourens Broersma and
Jouke van Dijk
Abstract
The aim of this study is to gain insight into the gender-specific career advance-
ment of about 10,000 middle- and top-level managers in a Dutch financial
services company. Our results indicate that women earn less, work at lower job
levels, but show slightly higher career mobility than men. However, working a
compressed four-day nine-hours-a-day workweek turns out to be favourable for
women who are ‘rewarded’ for working full time, whereas men are ‘penalized’
for not working five days a week. Introducing this form of flexibility into a
predominantly masculine organizational culture offers new opportunities for
career advancement, albeit solely for women.
1. Introduction
Both men and women may encounter difficulties in the course of their occu-
pational career, which can be linked to organizational aspects, existing preju-
dice, the presence of informal networks, and norms and values related to
management positions (Eagly and Carli 2007). Women, in particular, face the
double burden syndrome of combining caretaking activities and other unpaid
work with a paid job. The financial service sector is traditionally a typical
masculine sector — very competitive, hierarchical and with high risks.
Although the sector has been feminizing in terms of employees, the boards of
directors continue to lack diversity (Sealy et al. 2009). Similar to other sectors,
women are over-represented in jobs where communication and human contact
are important, and under-represented at the top levels (Van Staveren 2011). In
Inge Noback, Lourens Broersma and Jouke van Dijk are at the University of Groningen.
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
British Journal of Industrial Relations
54:1 March 2016 0007–1080 pp. 114–135
doi: 10.1111/bjir.12048
this article, we will demonstrate the existence of a masculine organizational
culture in a financial services company where male employees who work a
compressed workweek with a 4/36 schedule (see later) work at lower job levels,
earn less and show lower career mobility than their female counterparts.
This research can be positioned in a growing number of quantitative
studies that focus on gender-specific career advancement and other related
aspects, such as discrimination, informal networks and organizational
culture (e.g. Eddleston et al. 2004; Guillaume and Pochic 2009). The aim of
this article is to gain insight into the gender-specific dynamics of career
advancement and the influence of flexible work-time arrangements. Career
advancement is measured in terms of tangible outcomes, namely salary, job
level and career mobility. We explore the extent to which sex, household
situation, corporate culture, human capital and spatial mobility have signifi-
cant effects on the career success of male and female employees, based on the
analysis of approximately 10,000 middle- and top-level managers. These data
were obtained from the personnel records of a major Dutch financial services
company and contained information about career advancement over the
period 2001–2008, including background characteristics of the employees. As
a case study for gender-specific career advancement, this firm is of interest
because of its progressive reputation with regard to human resources policies.
The company is publicly acclaimed for their favourable working conditions
and female-friendly policies, which will be discussed shortly.
We pay special attention to the relation between career success and new
working-time arrangements, in particular the compressed workweek (Baltes
et al. 1999), which entails working a four-day nine-hours-a-day (4/36) sched-
ule. This compressed workweek (4/36) has come into existence during the
economic crisis in the 1980s. High unemployment was an incentive for firms
to create more jobs by decreasing the amount of hours in a standard work-
week in the collective labour agreement of the business. According to the
human resources department of the firm, the main motivation to introduce
the 4/36 schedule was indeed to create more jobs.1Flexible working-time
arrangements, such as the compressed workweek, facilitate the combination
of work and care, which, given the gendered division of care tasks and other
household responsibilities, most likely contributes to the career advancement
of women and in particular mothers. In the Netherlands, the majority of
women work part time to take care of their children, rather than opting for
full-time formal day care (Noback et al. 2013).
There is a growing interest in gender diversity in the financial sector since the
publication of Women Matter by McKinsey and Company (Desvaux et al.
2007), where it was suggested that firms with a larger share of women on the
board have better financial performance. The company we have analysed is
motivated by this study to improve performance in a highly competitive sector
by a publicly committed policy to increase the number of female top-level
managers. To achieve this goal, the firm stimulates career advancement of
talented women through coaching and training programmes, and stimulates
the visibility of talented women in the organization. In the Netherlands,
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013.
Climbing the Ladder 115

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