Women who are still fighting the glass ceiling for corporate advancement may find that the way up lies through the corporation’s board, according to data released Sunday by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
The data are from the study titled "Chipping Away at the Glass Ceiling: Gender Spillovers in Corporate Leadership," which will be published in the May 2011 issue of The American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings.
An analysis of data spanning the years from 1997 to 2009 revealed that as the number of women sitting on corporate boards increased, so did the number of women executives at those companies. The phenomenon did not work in reverse; in other words, if a company gained more women in top executive positions, female representation on its board did not increase.