In the paper The Origins and Real Effects of the Gender Gap: Evidence from CEOs’ Formative Years (forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies), we provide the first systematic evidence on the socioeconomic backgrounds of U.S. CEOs. Using individual census records for the families where the CEOs grew up, we study how CEOs’ formative experiences affect their capital allocation decisions. Our main finding is that CEOs raised in male-dominated families—those where the father was the only income earner and had more education than the mother—hire fewer women and allocate smaller capital budgets to female managers. We argue that gender effects in financial policies originate in CEO beliefs developed during formative years.

Our study is motivated by an ongoing debate about whether male managers obtain more resources, such as pay, capital, or promotion opportunities, than their female peers. If such a gender gap exists, it remains unclear whether it reflects a potential bias of the decision makers or results from economic factors correlated with gender, such as productivity or risk aversion. Similarly, the effects on economic outcomes are not fully understood.

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