Managers and the Cultural Transmission of Gender Norms

Speaker: Dr Kieu-Trang Nguyen

Affiliation: University of Melbourne

Location: Room 221, Michie Building (#09), St Lucia Campus

Abstract: This paper examines the influence of managers from countries with different gender norms on workplace culture and gender disparities within organizations. Using data from a multinational firm operating in over 100 countries, we exploit cross-country manager rotations that are orthogonal to workers to estimate the impact of male managers’ gender norms on the work outcomes of male and female workers within the same team. Managers from countries with one standard deviation more progressive gender attitudes narrow the gender pay gap by 5 percentage points (18%), primarily by promoting women at higher rates. The effects last beyond the manager’s rotation and are concentrated in countries with more conservative gender attitudes. Moreover, workers in the destination office change their own attitudes, as evidenced by those workers in turn being more gender-equal with their subordinates. Our evidence points to individual managers as critical in shaping corporate culture.