Friday, May 9, 2025
No Result
View All Result
  • Media
Support Us
Macdonald-Laurier Institute
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy
      • Economic Policy
      • Justice
      • Rights and Freedoms
      • Assisted Suicide (MAID)
      • Health Care
      • COVID-19
      • Gender Identity
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • AI, Technology and Innovation
      • Media and Telecoms
      • Housing
      • Immigration
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Competition Policy
    • Energy Policy
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy
      • Israel-Hamas War
      • Ukraine
      • Taiwan
      • China
      • Europe and Russia
      • Indo-Pacific
      • Middle East and North Africa
      • North America
      • Foreign Interference
      • National Defence
      • National Security
      • Foreign Affairs
    • Indigenous Affairs
  • Projects
    • CNAPS (Center for North American Prosperity and Security)
    • The Promised Land
    • Voices that Inspire: The Macdonald-Laurier Vancouver Speaker Series
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Justice Report Card
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • Double Trouble
    • Digital Policy & Connectivity
    • Managing Indigenous Prosperity
    • Defending The Marketplace of Ideas
    • Reforming the University
    • Past Projects
      • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
      • The Transatlantic Program
      • COVID Misery Index
        • Provincial COVID Misery Index
        • Beyond Lockdown
        • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
      • Speak for Ourselves
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
      • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
        • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Inside Policy
  • Libraries
    • Columns
    • Commentary
    • Papers
    • Books
    • Video
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy
      • Economic Policy
      • Justice
      • Rights and Freedoms
      • Assisted Suicide (MAID)
      • Health Care
      • COVID-19
      • Gender Identity
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • AI, Technology and Innovation
      • Media and Telecoms
      • Housing
      • Immigration
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Competition Policy
    • Energy Policy
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy
      • Israel-Hamas War
      • Ukraine
      • Taiwan
      • China
      • Europe and Russia
      • Indo-Pacific
      • Middle East and North Africa
      • North America
      • Foreign Interference
      • National Defence
      • National Security
      • Foreign Affairs
    • Indigenous Affairs
  • Projects
    • CNAPS (Center for North American Prosperity and Security)
    • The Promised Land
    • Voices that Inspire: The Macdonald-Laurier Vancouver Speaker Series
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Justice Report Card
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • Double Trouble
    • Digital Policy & Connectivity
    • Managing Indigenous Prosperity
    • Defending The Marketplace of Ideas
    • Reforming the University
    • Past Projects
      • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
      • The Transatlantic Program
      • COVID Misery Index
        • Provincial COVID Misery Index
        • Beyond Lockdown
        • COVID and after: A mandate for recovery
      • Speak for Ourselves
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
      • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
        • Aboriginal Canada and Natural Resources
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Inside Policy
  • Libraries
    • Columns
    • Commentary
    • Papers
    • Books
    • Video
No Result
View All Result
Macdonald-Laurier Institute

In the business world, the old boys’ club appears to be alive and well: Linda Nazareth in The Globe and Mail

March 2, 2020
in Domestic Policy, Latest News, Columns, In the Media, Economic Policy, Linda Nazareth
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A

The real lesson might be that companies are kidding themselves if they think they have levelled the playing field for women in the corporate world, writes Linda Nazareth 

By Linda Nazareth, March 2, 2020

Bending his ear while you grab beers after work, chatting at the Xerox machine, sharing your views (and your despair) over the fate of your favourite hockey team: Schmoozing with the boss is a time-old tradition. Although it is no secret that those who do it well can see it reflected it their pay stubs, a new study suggests that the paybacks to men from schmoozing can be significant, enough to explain a chunk of the earnings differential between men and women.

That on the whole men earn more than women is not in dispute, although the size of the gap depends on the measure you use to track it. In Canada, Statistics Canada data for 2016 shows that for full-time workers, women earned 75 cents for every dollar earned by men. If you look just at workers paid by the hour, as of 2018 women aged from 25 to 54 were up to about 87 cents of men’s wages, an improvement from 82 cents a couple of decades ago. The gap is presumably narrowing as women acquire postsecondary education at a faster clip than men, but it does not seem to be going away.

Studies on the earning gap tend to focus not just on whether there is rank discrimination at work, but also on the decisions men and women make as regards the workplace. Family responsibilities, says a common argument, mean that women cannot devote the same time to work as men so often choose an easier and lower paid path. Women take time off to have children, goes another explanation, and that obviously hurts their earning potential. And hey, don’t women just choose fields that pay less? At least on the surface some of these arguments have merit, but in fact the reasons for the pay gap may be more subtle than they appear to be.

Schmooze or lose is the message from the new study, but only if you are a guy. Its authors, Zoe Cullen of Harvard and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of the University of California Los Angeles, did a large-scale study of a commercial bank in Asia, tracking what happened to workers when they got a new manager. Their conclusion, based on observing 14,736 workers, showed that men’s career trajectories improved significantly when they switched from a female to male supervisor, translating to a 13-per-cent increase in pay when observed 10 quarters after the transition. For women, however, switching bosses to either a man or a woman did not translate into higher pay.

The idea that schmoozing the boss makes the difference to men comes from the study’s authors, who first ruled out other reasons why the pay hike might have showed up. Their data found that getting a new male boss did not make the men work more hours, or produce more as measured by revenue, or even become less likely to quit. Instead, they noted that when men switched to a new boss, they upped the number of breaks they took with their managers. As well, the authors found that the pay hikes were only evident when the employee and the manager worked in close proximity to each other. To further test their theory about the value of socialization, they looked at what happened when a male employee who smoked was paired with a manager who also smoked. That one is a real career blaster apparently, with the authors finding that in those situations even more break time is spent together and that promotions happen fast.

Dr. Cullen and Dr. Perez-Truglia put some numbers to the schmoozing effect, finding that, at least in their example, it explained over one-third of the pay gap between women and men in the organization that they studied. Of course, the results could be unique to that organization, or unique to Asia where the experiment took place. Then again, many people could tell you that you do not need any kind of academic study to figure out that personal relationships matter in the work world, particularly if you are a woman.

As to what lessons can be learned from the formal conclusion that schmoozing matters, of course individual employees can decide that they are going to get on that bandwagon and bone up on the boss’s favourite team, or perhaps learn to play golf (a traditional chestnut of advice given to ambitious women). For organizations, however, the real lesson from the study might be that they are kidding themselves if they think they have levelled the playing field by putting in what they think are effective policies to treat everyone the same. There may be no simple way to get rid of the schmoozing effect, but at least accepting that the old boys’ club is alive and well might be a first step.

Linda Nazareth is the principal of Relentless Economics and senior fellow for economics and population change at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Visit her at relentlesseconomics.com

Tags: WomenemploymenteconomyLinda NazarethLaboureconomicseconomic policy

Related Posts

Carney is good news for the CBC, and bad news for the rest: Peter Menzies in The Line
Media and Telecoms

Carney is good news for the CBC, and bad news for the rest: Peter Menzies in The Line

May 9, 2025
Hybrid threats, broken borders, and organized chaos—transnational organized crime in Canada: Inside Policy Q&A with Cal Chrustie
Domestic Policy

Hybrid threats, broken borders, and organized chaos—transnational organized crime in Canada: Inside Policy Q&A with Cal Chrustie

May 9, 2025
The US should be worried about Canada’s foreign policy: Casey Babb in The Hill
Foreign Policy

The US should be worried about Canada’s foreign policy: Casey Babb in The Hill

May 8, 2025
Next Post
Philip Cross

With storm clouds on the horizon, Canada’s economy points to slow growth: MLI’s Leading Economic Indicator

Newsletter Signup

  Thank you for Signing Up
  Please correct the marked field(s) below.
Email Address  *
1,true,6,Contact Email,2
First Name *
1,true,1,First Name,2
Last Name *
1,true,1,Last Name,2
*
*Required Fields

Follow us on

Macdonald-Laurier Institute

323 Chapel Street, Suite #300
Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 7Z2 Canada

613.482.8327

info@macdonaldlaurier.ca
MLI directory

Support Us

Support the Macdonald-Laurier Institute to help ensure that Canada is one of the best governed countries in the world. Click below to learn more or become a sponsor.

Support Us

  • Inside Policy Magazine
  • Annual Reports
  • Jobs
  • Privacy Policy

© 2023 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • About
    • Who We Are
    • Who Makes MLI Work
    • Tenth Anniversary
  • Experts
    • Experts Directory
    • In Memoriam
  • Issues
    • Domestic Policy
      • Economic Policy
      • Justice
      • Rights and Freedoms
      • Assisted Suicide (MAID)
      • Health Care
      • COVID-19
      • Gender Identity
      • Canada’s Political Tradition
      • AI, Technology and Innovation
      • Media and Telecoms
      • Housing
      • Immigration
      • Agriculture and Agri-Food
      • Competition Policy
    • Energy Policy
      • Energy
      • Environment
    • Foreign Policy
      • Israel-Hamas War
      • Ukraine
      • Taiwan
      • China
      • Europe and Russia
      • Indo-Pacific
      • Middle East and North Africa
      • North America
      • Foreign Interference
      • National Defence
      • National Security
      • Foreign Affairs
    • Indigenous Affairs
  • Projects
    • CNAPS (Center for North American Prosperity and Security)
    • The Promised Land
    • Voices that Inspire: The Macdonald-Laurier Vancouver Speaker Series
    • Dragon at the Door
    • Justice Report Card
    • The Great Energy Crisis
    • DisInfoWatch.org
    • Double Trouble
    • Digital Policy & Connectivity
    • Managing Indigenous Prosperity
    • Defending The Marketplace of Ideas
    • Reforming the University
    • Past Projects
      • Canada and the Indo-Pacific Initiative
      • The Transatlantic Program
      • COVID Misery Index
      • Speak for Ourselves
      • The Eavesdropping Dragon: Huawei
      • Talkin’ in the Free World with Mariam Memarsadeghi
      • An Intellectual Property Strategy for Canada
      • Munk Senior Fellows
      • A Mandate for Canada
      • Confederation Series
      • Fiscal Reform
      • The Canadian Century project
      • Fixing Canadian health care
      • Internal trade
      • From a mandate for change
      • Size of government in Canada
      • Straight Talk
      • Labour Market Report
      • Leading Economic Indicator
      • Centre for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad
      • Indigenous Prosperity at a Crossroads
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
      • MLI Dinners
      • Great Canadian Debates
  • Latest News
  • Inside Policy
  • Libraries
    • Columns
    • Commentary
    • Papers
    • Books
    • Video

© 2023 Macdonald-Laurier Institute. All Rights reserved.

Lightbox image placeholder

Previous Slide

Next Slide

Share

Facebook ShareTwitter ShareLinkedin SharePinterest ShareEmail Share

TwitterTwitter
Hide Tweet (admin)

Add this ID to the plugin's Hide Specific Tweets setting: