Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Can women in leadership encourage other women’s advancement in lower ranks? I examine the impact of a female department chair in reducing the gender pay gap in her department. I employ a unique dataset that provides information on the department and position of every faculty member in five public universities. Using year-to-year variation in the gender of department chair within departments, I find that a differential impact of female department chair on women versus men: female chairs increase the wage of women by 2 percentage points while there is no impact on the wage of men. The impact is mainly driven by full professors, and its magnitude varies across fields. To make sense of the mechanism behind female leadership, other potential outcomes – hiring female faculty members, promotion, the initial salary of faculty, publication, and co-authorship – are investigated.