Women Ascend the Corporate Ladder More Slowly Than Men

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This story appears in the spring 2025 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as “The Slow Climb.”

While women have made gains in the workplace in recent decades, data shows it still takes women longer to get promoted than men. And even fewer women make it to the top of the corporate ladder compared to men.

Elizabeth L. Campbell, an assistant professor of management at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, studies gender differences in career advancement. Her research addresses why women still lag behind men in earnings and positions in the public and private sectors.

“Women are doing what conventional wisdom says is necessary for success,” says Campbell. “They’re earning advanced degrees, entering high-paying industries and acquiring impressive qualifications at rates equal to or higher than men. However, progress toward gender equality has stalled.”

Campbell’s research finds that gender matters significantly when making hiring decisions.

“Our research suggests that overqualified women and sufficiently qualified men tend to be hired for the same jobs and ranks,” she says. This discrepancy is due to gender-biased assumptions.

“People tend to fall back on unconscious biases and stereotypes without realizing it,” says Campbell. “Our study found that hiring managers thought overqualified men would feel that they’re ‘too good for this job’ and were a ‘flight risk.’”

Yet, hiring managers didn’t have this same concern with overqualified women for two reasons: First, they fell back on gender stereotypes about women — i.e., “the motherhood penalty,” a type of labor market discrimination in which women, who are often also mothers, are stereotyped as the primary caregiver with competing work and family demands. This assumption was applied to all women, even though hiring managers had no information on the candidate’s family status. Second, hiring managers rationalized overqualified women’s motivations and guessed they were trying to leave a company with unfair barriers to their advancement, so they would be willing to take a relatively lower-ranking position in a new firm.

According to Campbell, if workplaces are interested in correcting this problem, system-based changes are more effective at reducing inequality rather than relying on individual managers and employees to fix inherent biases in their hiring and promotion processes.

“System-based changes, even simple ones, are more effective at reducing inequality than antibias awareness training alone, which has short-lived effects when not linked to actionable strategies for people to change their behavior,” says Campbell. “In addition, company leaders should look hard at their retention practices to ensure they are standardized and not left to the discretion of individual managers.”