Climbing the corporate ladder: Do female and male executives follow the same route?

Karen S. Lyness, Donna E. Thompson·2000·Journal of Applied Psychology
DOI 10.1037//0021-9010.85.1.86

Abstract

This study compares the careers of matched samples of 69 female executives and 69 male executives by examining perceived barriers and facilitators of advancement, self-reported developmental experiences, and career histories. Consistent with tokenism theory, women reported greater barriers, such as lack of culture fit and being excluded from informal networks, and greater importance of having a good track record and developing relationships to facilitate advancement than did men. Career success, measured by organizational level and compensation, was positively related to breadth of experience and developmental assignments for both genders, but successful women were less likely than successful men to report that mentoring facilitated their advancement. Developmental experiences and career histories were similar for female and male executives, but men had more overseas assignments and women had more assignments with nonauthority relationships.

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    Rudolph, Cort W., Katz, Ian M., Lavigne, Kristi N., Zacher, Hannes · 2017 · Journal of Vocational Behavior
  3. Conceptualizing and evaluating career success
    Heslin, Peter A. · 2005 · Journal of Organizational Behavior
  4. THE RELATIONSHIPS OF AGE WITH JOB ATTITUDES: A META-ANALYSIS
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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Climbing the corporate ladder: Do female and male executives follow the same route? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0021-9010.85.1.86
The paper
Lyness, K. S., & Thompson, D. E. (2000). Climbing the corporate ladder: Do female and male executives follow the same route? Journal of Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0021-9010.85.1.86

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.