Abstract
Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In our setting, being sponsored provides a vote of confidence and/or creates a link between the protégé’s and sponsor’s payoffs. We find that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. As a result, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. We discuss how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field. Data, as supplemental material, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2606 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Highlights
Professional service firms provide lucrative career opportunities for individuals with a desire to compete in technical fields such as accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting
We explore a new institutional change - the implementation of a sponsorship program - and ask whether it can reduce the gender gap in willingness to compete
Our experiment focuses on these two aspects of sponsorship: the vote of confidence that being sponsored may provide and the linkage of protégé and sponsor compensation
Summary
Professional service firms provide lucrative career opportunities for individuals with a desire to compete in technical fields such as accounting, law, engineering, and management consulting. Each year, these organizations recruit large classes of talented new associates to support the client service work of their managers and partners, with the goal of promoting the top talent to senior positions within the organization. Client demands, lack of work/life balance, limited access to positive role models and pressure to compete and win business are just a few of the factors that lead some professionals, especially women, to abandon the partnership track (see, Baldiga 2004, and related work on female advancement by Bertrand, Goldin, and Katz 2010, and Goldin 2014). Women have comprised almost 50% of the entry cohort in the public accounting profession for more than two decades, but make up less than 20% of firm partners (AICPA, 2015).
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