Do female managers improve women's promotional opportunities?

This chapter investigates whether female managers improve the promotional opportunities of women in organizations. More specifically, we analyze whether the perceived promotional opportunities of female and male workers are affected by the proportion of female managers in the organization, and by being supervised by a female manager. We propose opposing hypotheses stating that female managers are either change agents who actively improve the opportunities of female workers, or ‘cogs in the machine' who do not affect, or even hamper, the promotional opportunities of female workers. The worker–manager linked data from the European Sustainable Workforce Survey allows a rigorous test of these hypotheses. Analyses show that women do not perceive more or fewer promotional opportunities when they work in an organization with a high proportion of female managers, nor when they are supervised by a female manager. Gender differences in perceived promotional opportunities are mainly driven by the arranging of men and women into different teams within organizations, which indicates that female managers at low and high levels are not able to abolish sorting-based gender inequality within organizations