The Paradox of Diversity At The Top

Abstract

Increasingly, women in top management positions are seen as a panacea for alleviating diversity and inclusivenessissuesat all levels in the organizations through “trickle-down” effects of role modeling, concrete support and championing of diversity. Towards this end, corporations and policy-makers are putting a great deal of effort and resources into developing and implementing policies to hire women in top management roles (e.g., quotas and targets for women on boards) with the ultimate objective of enhancing diversity in the talent pool throughout the organization. This push for promoting more women in top management as a way to enhance gender-diverse talent pipeline at lower levels raises an important question: Does gender diversity in senior management roles promote progress of women at lower levels of the organization? We draw insights from and ground our arguments in the decoupling theory and test our cross-level hypotheses in a unique longitudinal dataset comprising 195 of the largest US based law firms . We support our theoretical argument using insights from 15 qualitative interviews. We find that an increase in the number of women in top management roles reduces the hiring prospects and increases attrition for women in junior ranks. We provide evidence that certain organizational practices reduce these paradoxical, cross-level decoupling effects of female representation in senior leadership positions.