Gender differences in promotion patterns into CEO and Vice-president positions in Denmark

This paper analyses the gender gap in promotion into top corporate jobs based on employer-employee data on all Danish companies with more than 50 employees. The raw promotion rates show a constant gender gap during the period 1997-2007. We estimate the probability of promotion into VP and CEO positions and find significant coefficients of a number of child related variables as well as variables reflecting whether the firms may be “female-friendly” in their hiring policy. However, even after controlling for these effects, there is still a significant gap in the promotion probabilities into VP and CEO position. The unexplained gap is larger for promotion into CEO positions compared to VP positions, contrary to a priori expectations.