Appearing in the Spring 2025 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as The Slow Climb

Although women have made notable strides in the workforce over the past few decades, research shows that their path to promotion remains slower than that of men. Fewer women also reach the highest levels of leadership in corporate settings.

Elizabeth L. Campbell, assistant professor of management at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management, focuses her research on the gender disparities that persist in career progression. Her work explores why women continue to fall behind men in both salary and leadership roles across public and private sectors.

Women are following the expected path to success, Campbell explains. They’re earning advanced degrees, entering lucrative fields, and gaining impressive credentials at rates equal to or exceeding those of men. Yet, progress toward true gender equality has hit a plateau.

Campbell’s research reveals that gender plays a significant role in hiring decisions.

Our findings show that overqualified women and adequately qualified men are often hired for the same roles and ranks, she says. This outcome is largely driven by implicit gender biases.

Unconscious stereotypes influence decisions more than people realize, Campbell notes. For example, hiring managers often viewed overqualified men as likely to become dissatisfied or leave, labeling them a ‘flight risk.

However, this concern didn’t extend to overqualified women. Instead, two assumptions came into play: First, gender stereotypes like the motherhood penalty the belief that women, often presumed to be primary caregivers, have competing demands from family  were applied across the board, even in the absence of information about a candidate’s personal life. Second, hiring managers believed that overqualified women were likely escaping previous employers where their career growth had been unfairly limited, making them more open to taking a lower-level role in a new organization.

Campbell emphasizes that lasting solutions require systemic change. Simply relying on individual managers or employee efforts to counteract bias is not enough.

Structural reforms even modest ones are more effective in reducing inequality than one-off antibias trainings, which often have only temporary impacts unless paired with clear, actionable steps, she says. Organizations should also closely examine their retention strategies to ensure they are standardized and not left to the subjective judgment of individual managers.

Source: https://today.ucsd.edu/story/women-ascend-the-corporate-ladder-more-slowly-than-men