A couple of interesting studies about gender in the business context have recently been released.

First, a study by A. Can Inci, M.P. Narayanan, and H. Nejat Seyhun concludes – based on profits earned from insider trading – that women executives have less access to inside information than do men with similar positions.  They attempt to control for the fact that women may simply be more risk averse by controlling for trade size; they find, however, that even when doing so, men make more than women.  Of particular interest is the fact that even though their study goes back to 1975 (when there were fewer women executives), they find that the gender differences are stronger in more recent years, from 1997-2012.  They believe that the differences are attributable to informal networking that grants men access to better information than women; these differences fall away for firms that have a greater proportion of women executives.

Second, the Rockefeller Foundation finds that when a company experiences a crisis and the CEO is a woman, eighty percent of news stories cite her as a problem; when the CEO is a man, only thirty-one percent of news stories cite him as a problem.

Of course, it’s possible that the reporting is entirely accurate – maybe women CEOs are responsible for crises more often than men.  But there are, of course, other potential explanations.  For example, biases against women generally – a sense that she doesn’t deserve the position – or perhaps the fact that women generally only achieve CEO status when a company is already experiencing problems.   I’ll also throw out another possibility: Salience.  There’s a fairly well-documented psychological phenomenon whereby people attribute causality to whatever is salient about a situation.  The thing that draws their attention is assumed to be the cause.  That thing might be an entirely neutral characteristic – like having red hair in a group of brunettes, or wearing a striped shirt – or, in the case of CEOs, being a woman in a position typically held by men. Of course, if salience is partially the cause, I’d expect successes also to be disproportionately credited to women – and I have no idea whether that’s the case, or whether an interaction of biases could prevent such a phenomenon from surfacing. 

What it comes down to is, we can really only be sure of our perceptions when enough women occupy the CEO position to make them unnoticeable.