Gender gaps in promotion: it is also because women apply less

A related recent post (Who stays longer, male or female CEOs?) documents that women account for 5 per cent of CEOs of major North American firms as of January 2018 (Catalyst). According to Bertrand and Hallock (2001), they represented 2.5 per cent of top executives in US firms in the 1990s. Even if these two figures are not perfectly comparable, they are interesting in two regards: first, it seems that there has been some progress in terms of female representation at the top over the last decades. Second, despite the rapid increase in women’s educational attainment, which is now higher than that of men on average, gender gaps in labour markets are still large in terms of wages, promotions and seniority.