Researcher ORCID Identifier

0000-0001-6960-1857

Graduation Year

2022

Date of Submission

4-2022

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Jeffrey Flory

Rights Information

© 2022 Theresa M. Versen

Abstract

Gender disparities in the workplace with regard to career position, leadership, and compensation are areas of study that continue to gain attention from the media and lead to commitments to improvement from firms themselves. Despite the improvements made in recent years compared to the twentieth century environment for women in the workplace, equality has not been achieved and important disparities remain to gain attention (Keller, Molina, and Olney 2020). This research examines how, if at all, a CEO’s gender impacts their likelihood for dismissal. I apply a linear probability model to two samples consisting of nearly 30 years of cross-sectional data, both of which have more CEO departures and transparency around the classification of the type of the departure than most used in CEO dismissal research. I find that Female CEOs are between 49.7% to 79.7% more likely to be dismissed than their male counterparts when accounting for factors related to age, status, experience, firm size, and firm performance. I also find that female CEOs have an increased likelihood of being involuntarily dismissed by between 6 to 7.6 percentage points while female CEOs above the age of 60 have an increased dismissal likelihood of over 27 percentage points compared to their male counterparts. I apply the linear probability models to two samples and verify the statistical significance of the variables in my models through additional non-parametric variable testing and full-model testing with probit and logit regressions.

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This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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