Research seminars at the Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre

The Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre (WLC) is thrilled to announce the return of the Professor Sucheta Nadkarni Research Seminar Series, on 14 October 2021, for its second year. This seminar series honours our friend and colleague, and former Director of the Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre the late Professor Sucheta Nadkarni, and her pioneering research into gender diversity.

This year’s Professor Sucheta Nadkarni Research Seminar will be delivered by Dr Isabella Grabner, Professor of Strategy and Managerial Accounting at Vienna University of Economics and Business. The seminar entitled – Don’t be left holding the mop: Gender differences in participation in, and reward for, office glamour work versus office housework – continues to explore issues of gender diversity in alignment with Sucheta’s outstanding research in the field.

What roles do collaboration networks play in explaining gender differences in entrepreneurial entry? Are network effects gender symmetric or asymmetric?

The research investigates these questions by comparing rates of entrepreneurial patenting in a matched sample of male and female “garage inventors”, observing inventors’ patenting and collaboration networks from their first independent patents to their first entrepreneurial patents (new patents with newly formed firms).

The rate of entrepreneurial patenting by female inventors is significantly increased when they have been collaborating in larger inventive teams, larger inventive networks or mixed gender teams.

Further analysis shows that of these effects, team size and network size are gender symmetric, increasing rates of entrepreneurial patenting in the same way for men and women. However, the mixed gender team effect is asymmetric, increasing rates for women but decreasing rates for men. Although developing broader networks is important for women, working on mixed gender teams may provide them with a unique advantage.

The study also points to the need for additional research into the asymmetry of network effects on entrepreneurship.

Given their central roles in organisations, investors and analysts are likely to assess the leadership qualities of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in public interactions. In such settings, female CEOs face a challenge since individuals typically view leadership roles as masculine and expect leaders to exhibit agentic characteristics. At the same time, due to gender stereotypes, individuals typically expect females to display communal qualities. Analysing quarterly earnings’ call transcripts, we develop and test arguments about how female CEOs manage this tension and balance the need to be seen as both agentic and communal. We also develop arguments about how investors respond to the agentic and communal attributes of CEO communication. Our findings largely support our hypothesised model.

Increasing attention – both in the scholarly literature and in the world of policy makers and practitioners – is being paid to the challenges facing female entrepreneurs. What was once assumed to be a merit-based system for encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurs is now understood to operate in gendered ways that in many cases disadvantage female founders. These effects occur across the entire pipeline, beginning with the dearth of women seeking to start high growth companies, to the lack of funding opportunities and mentorship. There are substantial differences in the number of startups led by women, their levels of relevant experience and the amount of funding – both debt and equity – they seek and receive. Some have argued that women tend to found lower potential startups. Yet, even controlling for quality, we see many implicit biases in how female founders are treated. One important approach to redressing inequalities might be through the use of accelerators. Entrepreneurship accelerators are proliferating in both developed and developing economies as different cities, regions and sectors seek to increase economic growth and employment. Accelerators are designed to give a boost to startups by providing in a concentrated way the mentorship, networks, training and financing required to be successful. The presence of accelerators could have the potential to solve some of the challenges female entrepreneurs face, however preliminary evidence suggests that they, for the most part, seem to be perpetuating the gendered dynamics that exist in the entrepreneurial system. On the other hand, there is no systematic research on how accelerators do or might address the gendered dynamics of entrepreneurship. Because accelerators are seen as such an important policy tool for increasing entrepreneurial success, it is imperative that we develop and analyse systematic data on accelerators and their effects, particularly on female founders. In this study, we will draw on what is known to date on female entrepreneurs and more broadly on the research on gender in organisations and the economy to understand the dynamics of acceleration in entrepreneurship. Using a longitudinal database of over 3,000 ventures in nearly 50 accelerators, we trace the effects of selection into the accelerator and the acceleration process on outcomes for women-only, women-led, and male-only venture teams. We couple survey data with interviews of accelerators to understand whether and when acceleration can be a tool for mitigating gender bias in female entrepreneurship.

The gender gap in earnings and rewards remains persistent across many professional and managerial work contexts. In these settings, where there are few objective criteria for performance and organisational mechanisms are weak, we propose that personal political values can serve as a powerful influence on whether supervisors reduce or enhance inequalities in performance-based rewards. We develop theory about how political liberalism versus conservatism, reflecting different views on social inequality and social change, affect supervisors’ perceptions and allocative decision making. Combining internal personnel and billings data with publicly-available political donation records in a large law firm, we test the effect of political ideology among supervising law firm partners on the performance-based bonuses awarded to male and female subordinate lawyers. We find the male-female gender gap in performance-based pay is reduced for professional workers tied to liberal supervisors, relative to conservative supervisors. We further find this political ideology effect increases for workers with greater seniority in the organisation. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the determinants of the gender earnings gap, suggesting that in settings where managers have leeway over rewards and careers, their personal political beliefs have an important influence on outcomes for male and female workers.

The issue of female representation in corporate leadership positions has taken centre-stage among policy-makers, corporations and academics alike. The central focus of research, discussions and debates has predominantly focused on current female representation on corporate boards, which tells us little about what future strategies are in place to ensure a sustainable pipeline of qualified and board-ready female candidates and longevity of female board representation.

Examining female rise to boardrooms holistically is important to evaluate the degree to which females play a meaningful role on corporate boards and in shaping corporate strategies and outcomes.

Professor Nadkarni will share findings of her award-winning research on the global enablers and inhibitors of women in corporate boardrooms where she examined how economic, cultural, political and regulatory factors in different countries shape female board percentage and sustainability. This research won the highly commented award for thought leadership at the Investment week innovation and marketing awards in 2015 was nominated for the University of Cambridge Vice Chancellor’s impact award in 2016.

The issue of female representation on the board has taken centre stage among academicians and practitioners alike, but has also generated considerable controversy and debate. Yet, sadly, we know almost nothing as to how this issue pans out globally. The primary motivation of this study is to fill this important gap and to present comprehensive and nuanced explanations of global variations in female representation on the board. We integrate the resource dependence (RDT) (female market participation and proportion of females holding parliamentary seats) and institutional theories (mandatory quotas and corporate governance code) to propose socio-political drivers of global variation in the number and turnover of female board members. We test these propositions using 1045 largest firms (Forbes Global 2000 list) from 41 countries and 51 industries over a 10-year period: 2004-2013. We found that female market participation, female political representation and gender diversity requirement in corporate governance codes related positively to the number of female board members and negatively to female board turnover. However, mandatory quotas related positively to the number of female board members but did not relate significantly to female board turnover. Together, these results point to the importance of RDT and institutional explanations of global variation in female board representation, but also raise questions about the value of quotas in enhancing female board representation and longevity.

Across the globe, elite professional work has been predominantly male-dominated and even committed organisational interventions have been unsuccessful in maintaining completely egalitarian workspaces. In this context, the case of elite law firms in India poses a puzzle. In the country’s most prestigious firms, women are about one half the population, even at senior levels of partnership. This is at odds both with scholarship on women in high status professions as well as the more particular research on India. Using in-depth interviews with 130 elite professionals across different organisational sites, this research adopts comparative frameworks to reveal the organisational mechanisms underlying this unlikely gender parity. Unlike Indian banking and consulting firms that are local offices of elite global conglomerates, elite Indian law firms struggle with issues of organisational legitimacy and feel the need to aggressively differentiate themselves from their more traditional peers. At the same time, as institutions trying to mimic global firms without actual scripts to do so, these firms engage in a form of speculative isomorphism that has unlikely advantages for its actors. These data suggest that equal gender representation is one such mechanism by which these new, elite firms signal meritocracy and modernity to their global audience.

Research into the glass cliff examines what happens when women (and other minority groups) take on leadership roles in increasing numbers. Extending the metaphor of the glass ceiling, ‘the glass cliff’ describes the phenomenon whereby individuals belonging to particular groups are more likely to be found in leadership positions that are associated with a greater risk of failure and criticism. This talk will describe a programme of research which has uncovered the phenomenon of the glass cliff and investigates the underlying psychological processes.