Some Empirical Evidence on the Use of Gender Specific Promotion Rules

In this paper, empirical results are presented which demonstrate the significance of employee separations in the firm's decision concerning whom to promote. The results are quite supportive of the "jobs" theory of discrimination developed by Lazear and Rosen (1990), and several of the predictions of that model are confirmed in this paper. An important finding of the paper is that by accounting for the probability to separate from the firm, the size of the apparent female disadvantage in the promotion process is dramatically reduced to the point of being eliminated.